In a familiar sight for the white supremacist protest scene, a group of masked men stand holding signs. Dressed in signature blue shirts and khaki pants with white face masks, they are unmistakably wearing the uniforms of Patriot Front, a white nationalist group with chapters across the United States known for staging large marches and demonstrations on city streets.
This event was no different, as the activists took their signs and marched to a location where they could attract attention and controversy.
But these demonstrators are not standing on real asphalt, nor are the men standing together. The entire scene takes place on the digital streets of “Bloxberg,” a popular simulation of a real town on the gaming platform Roblox.
Nor are they actual members of Patriot Front. Having dubbed themselves the “Blueshirts,” this group of mostly US-based teenagers, with members as young as 13, models its aesthetic and activism after the real-life Patriot Front hate group, but they only exist online.
Part of a larger problem of extremism on the platform, the Blueshirts are one example of how the far right leverages popular video game platforms to spread their message and target young people. Roblox is an extremely popular application with youth, making it a place where they congregate and push boundaries. The problem goes much deeper than one group of white supremacist children, as the platform is simultaneously an incubator for child abuse material and exploitation.
An image posted inside the Blueshirts Discord chat showing a digital protest held by the group. The uniforms worn by the characters are modeled after the real, white supremacist Patriot Front. (Source: Discord)
Roblox relies completely on user-generated content to fill its platform and engage users. Design tools provided by Roblox allow players to create levels and games, called “experiences,” that can be made public for anyone to play. Players can also design, wear, and even sell custom clothing used by the in-game characters. Games can be simple or have complex stories and mechanics.
These features are used by the Blueshirts to create facsimiles of Patriot Front’s clothing, as well as custom areas or settings that the game will take place in that they have built to resemble the location of real-life white nationalist meet-ups. This includes a fighting ring with symbols from Will2Rise, a clothing brand and company associated with white supremacist Robert Rundo, founder of the Active Club movement which has chapters across North America, South America, Europe, and Australia. The Southern California branch of the movement recently held an annual mixed martial arts competition at a San Diego professional wrestling facility. The event featured combat sports and performances by two neo-Nazi bands.
A Blueshirts image captured during their recreation of an Active Club meet-up. (Source: Telegram)
Child Soldiers
The group actively seeks to recruit other gamers during their “protests” and will accept children into its ranks. In a conversation leaked from the Blueshirts’ Discord in September, one of the members discusses the possibility of using Minecraft to recruit.
A screen capture from the Blueshirts Discord server showing a discussion about using other games to recruit new members. (Source: Discord)
In groups of usually around three to five, the Blueshirts plan and conduct “raids” on games—when a group of accounts will join a game intending to annoy or harass other users. Some, like Bloxberg, are selected due to being extremely popular. Others are chosen because they allow for the group to spread their message directly. This includes the game “Spray Paint!” which provides a virtual city for players to digitally spray paint graffiti.
The Blueshirts use this as a place to advertise the URL for their social media channels alongside white nationalist slogans and symbols.
During one voice call, recorded by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), members of the Blueshirts used a Roblox game to spray paint “Deport Invaders” onto a wall. When they noticed another user watching them, they commented that the account appeared to be a child, While worried that the account might report them, they didn’t realize that they had actually invited the account represented by a child to join them in the game.
“Roblox usually leaves us alone if we don’t say anything,” one says. “Just do passive activism.”
“Tell him to go to the link,” another tells the rest. “Some five-year-old just got his first taste of white nationalism.”
In a different online protest, one user was hesitant to turn his microphone on, telling the chat he was still a “squeaker” — an online slang term for someone with a young sounding voice. The same user would also claim to have marched with Patriot Front, though this could not be independently confirmed.
Patriot Front, according to its website, only accepts applications from individuals over the age of 18. There was previously a Patriot Front inspired youth group that went by the name “Patriot Youth,” though Blueshirt members who discussed joining were told it was “defunct.”
Putting on the Blue Shirt
Joining the Blueshirts club is a relatively simple affair. After contacting the group via Telegram, applicants are then asked a series of questions interrogating their ideology and racial background. The test is designed to weed out infiltrators, non-Europeans, and anyone they view as subversive.
“What is your ethnicity and origin country/nation?” a recruiter asks.
The group is generally agnostic, accepting people from a variety of religions, but rejects Satanists as inexplicably connected to Judaism.
The same series of questions includes “What label would you use for your political ideology?”
Answers such as “fascist” and “National Socialist” receive entry into an invite-only chat on the application Discord. Discord was designed to be used for easy chat while playing and streaming video games, but has become a popular tool for numerous online communities, including extremists. Features allow for video and audio calls, live streaming of gameplay, and additional features that help users communicate and network online.
For the Blueshirts, Discord is a tool for organization. Channels announce to members how and when to log on and be invited to Roblox games where they coordinate their digital protest campaigns.
Blueshirt members will go into experiences, sometimes specifically intended for use by LGBTQ+ people, and make antisemitic, homophobic, and racist remarks. Causing conflict and trolling are part of their “fun,” but the main purpose appears to be recording and capturing images of the arguments and demonstrations that are later used for the creation of more propaganda.
A screenshot showing the Blueshirts demonstrating in a LGBTQ+ focused Roblox experience. (Source: Discord).
Edited screenshots and videos are then reposted and shared on their Telegram channel.
Inside the channel, members are encouraged to spend Robux, an in-game currency purchased with real money, to make their characters resemble real life Patriot Front counterparts. Uniforms designed by the Blueshirts are sold for Robux, allowing the platform and the Blueshirts to both eke out small profits from their membership, though Robux cannot be converted back to normal cash easily, and can only be spent inside the game.
The Blueshirts take great efforts to circumvent Roblox’s efforts at moderation. Many of the members have had accounts banned or access restricted to some of the items they design and sell. This has resulted in the use of multiple accounts and taking steps to obscure unique identifying information from the platform.
Roblox Exposing Children to More than White Supremacy
User-generated content is a distinct feature of Roblox, and as such, it has been used to create experiences that recreate violent events. This has included events like the 2019 Christchurch shooting that took the lives of 51 people. During its recent investigation, GPAHE found an experience that allowed users to enter a mosque and school dressed as Arda Küçükyetim, the perpetrator of an August 2024 stabbing attack in Eskişehir, Turkey. Injuring five, Küçükyetim left a manifesto citing online movements like Terrorgram, a network which supports white supremacist-inspired violence and mass casualty attacks, as his inspiration.
In the game, the character is armed with a range of different weapons from grenades to firearms that can kill any of the characters they come across.
Experiences that recreate real violent events have been a consistent problem for the gaming platform. In April 2025, a group of creators was exposed as contributing to Active Shooter Studios (ASS), a group dedicated to creating games that recreate massacres like the 1999 Columbine school shooting, which left 16 people dead, as well as numerous other violent events.
Despite action by the platform to remove ASS, the games are re-uploaded and easy to find using Roblox’s search feature.
Screenshot from an Active Shooter Studios game that allows players to dress as prominent killers and attack a school building. The character above is dressed as one of the perpetrators of the 1999 Columbine attack. (Source: Roblox).
Roblox is aware of the problem of extremism and the violent recreations that continue to live on the platform. Internal documents leaked by a hacker in 2022 included slides and internal discussions on how and when these types of experiences should be moderated. This included details about AI detection models used to approve images uploaded by users.
Some of the individuals who seek out children and encourage them to engage in depraved and degrading acts via the platform have been part of the Com, an extremist network engaged in a wide swath of criminality including fraud, hacking, child exploitation, and in the most extreme cases, murder and an alleged terrorist plot. This network often shares neo-Nazi and white nationalist imagery, while targeting primarily young girls and vulnerable people for exploitation.
Groups engaged in this type of behavior include 764, Harm Nation, Slit Town, and more. The FBI reported in 2025 having over 250 open investigations into exploitation by similar groups.
In some cases, children who are targeted are caught in a cycle of abuse where they are befriended online and then coerced into producing child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Once this occurs the perpetrators will threaten to release the CSAM online if the victim does not produce more. Some victims are forced to engage in self-harm, overdose on drugs, and more. Oftentimes the perpetrators were victims themselves, continuing a cycle of abuse.
This pattern has also seen predators capitalize on online trends, including in Roblox.
An in-game narrative that had become a role playing and quasi-religious movement, called “Spawnism,” was exploited by members of the Com network to target children. Borrowing parts of a storyline from the Roblox experience Forsaken, users began to identify with a cult inside the game that worshiped the symbol of the Roblox spawn point symbol—the spot where characters appear when they start a game or are killed and “respawn.” Those identifying as Spawnists claimed to believe in a form of reincarnation.
While the Spawnist subculture itself appears to have been role playing for some members and a more earnest experience for others, the community was targeted by members of the Com network. Victims were groomed and documented themselves engaging in acts of self harm like cutting.
Roblox Remains A Problem
While Roblox employs a number of moderation tools to attempt to mitigate white supremacist and extremist content on its platform. This includes automatically blocking slurs and profanity. Evading these systems can often be as simple as substituting characters with numbers, symbols, or lookalike letters—an “a” becomes “@” or an “i” becomes “1.” The slur remains readable to humans but harder for automated filters to detect. This behavior is forbidden according to Roblox’s policies, but difficult to moderate.
Roblox’s image protections do not detect drawn content in games like Spray Paint!, used by the Blueshirts, who often draw symbols associated with white supremacy, like the Celtic cross. CBS reported that researchers looking at the same game quickly found hate symbols like swastikas scrawled on the walls.
Filings by Roblox with the US Securities and Exchange Commission state children make up more than half of Roblox’s 97.8 million reported daily active users, with approximately 40 per cent of players under the age of 13, making Roblox a fertile hunting ground for individuals looking to target children.
The year 2025 has seen an influx of lawsuits contending that Roblox failed to address the issues of child exploitation. This includes a case in Louisiana, where State Attorney General Liz Murrill alleges that Roblox has failed to implement safety measures that would protect children on the platform from adult predators. Other suits alleging child exploitation on Roblox include cases in Michigan, California, Missouri, North Carolina, and New York.
