Habbo Hotel web game slammed in Channel 4 News report
Published Jun 12 2012, 16:13 BST | By Andrew Laughlin
Channel 4 News has uncovered "shocking lapses in moderation" at an online game popular with young teenagers, leaving them potentially vulnerable to sexual predators and paedophiles.The broadcaster investigated Habbo Hotel, a Finnish website that is claimed to be "the world's largest social game and online community for teenagers", with a reported 10m unique visitors a month.
Players create avatars and enter the brightly coloured virtual hotel, where they can move around, chat to others in public or private, and buy goods to furnish their own room.
But after Channel 4 News producer Rachel Seifert spent two months playing, under the guise of an 11-year-old girl, she frequently experienced encounters of a sexual nature.
"The chat was very sexual, perverse, violent, pornographic, overtly sexual acts, people saying they were going to do things to others, and it was very graphic," she is quoted as saying in a report on the Channel 4 News website.
"Within two minutes I was being asked individually 'Do you have a webcam?' 'can we chat on MSN, on Skype?' I was also within a couple of minutes asked to strip, fully naked, and asked what would I do on a webcam."
Channel 4 also found the site to be littered with pornographic sex chat, despite it being aimed at young teenagers.
Reporters for the broadcaster were contacted at one point by an avatar called 'DirtyBoii', who asked: "Can I ask u what yr body's like."
John Carr, a child safety expert who played the game with the Channel 4 News team, told the programme: "A moderator should be jumping in right now as it's not hard to see where this is going before it gets a lot worse. This is very worrying and going in a very bad direction.
"Here's someone aged 11 being asked to leave the site. There should be the equivalent of the virtual fire-brigade jumping in on this, but it's not happening.
"If I was a parent of an 11-year old girl on this site, I would want there to be a moral panic. This should not be happening. What I've just seen makes me think this is a dangerous place for youngsters to be.
"Businesses shouldn't put children at risk. If they are in this business, they have to be in it in the right way - the right moderators, the right software, to stop this happening."
Further inquiries into Habbo Hotel found two recent cases of peadophiles using the site to befriend children who they went on to abuse.
This includes Matthew Leonard, who was sent to jail for seven years after being found to have offered free "furniture" for Habbo Hotel rooms to persuade children to strip off in front of web cams.
After Channel 4 alerted Habbo Hotel maker Sulake about the issues, the site has posted the following warning: "We do not promote or allow explicitly sexual content. Cybering (talk simulating sex) and cam requests are strictly forbidden in Habbo. Any room that is set up to clearly signal cybering activities will immediately be shut down."
Paul LaFontaine, the chief executive of Sulake, told Channel 4 News that the company is committed to ensuring children's safety online.
"Any online community that allows users to assume virtual identities may be open to abuses, which is why we work hard to keep users safe, filtering content and blocking inappropriate users," he said.
"We also provide education and rapid-response support to users who experience uncomfortable conversations."
He added: "Habbo's moderation and safeguarding procedures includes employing more than 225 moderators, tracking some 70m lines of conversation globally every day on a 24/7 basis. These moderators cover all time-zones and the multiple languages in which Habbo users converse."
But Channel 4 News is concerned that games targeted at children and young people remain largely self-regulated, and so it has passed its findings to the government.
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i started playing when i was 13-14 and you know what i rarely seen what is described. i mean sure there were times but not as much as Rachel Seifert is saying. and i have spent almosed 12 years knowing about habbo and a good 6 solid years playing it. all they need is a type of chat filter/alert system! to the mods.. and from what everyone says the mods were never all that bad! they done there job!
June 14th 2012 at 8:04pm
Habbo Hotels? stance on pedophilia and sexual misconduct is incorrect, and could be greatly improved with more focus put into other areas than security, such as social awareness. The common idea voiced by adult men and women who notice an adult approaching a child is that he or she is a pedophile, this thought is a stupid one that results from human stupidity, its? the first that springs to mind, and the conversations that follow spread to many other people, news reporters and news channels, child-health companies and so forth. I am twenty-one years of age, and can be a friend or support to, someone under the age of thirteen without the idea of sex crossing my mind during chat; when I approach a child to talk, for no other reason than to entertain, educate or please, I do not consider myself a pedophile and have no intention of walking that way. However, because it is stereotypically abnormal for someone of my age to be friendly to children, and the child is an easy source of reason, to be special or heroic, a fountain of youth which feeds the action-hungry, the standard procedure is isolation from adult-social groups, and I?m automatically tagged as a child-abuser. There need not be supporting-evidence, the fact that a man of my age chooses a younger player as a friend suffices to the stupid wrong-minded adults; the stereotype is an insult, meant to boost ones? ego by sacrifice.
If it wasn?t for the third-party, there wouldn?t be as much sexual tension that leads to these sexual events; the notion that I ?must not? or ?should not? talk to a random child as a friend, as its? frowned upon by adults, is a vital component to secret sex-related chat- a classic Romeo and Juliet story, pleasure through the pain. The collection of adults who passively believe that pedophilia or pedophiles exist are their very creators, adults use this weaker image as an excuse to do nothing for children but still have respect to that audience. The social structures and whats? considered cool by common people is what requires the most alteration; when, in my previous example, I approached a child, if there was no intrusion, we would have talked fine - there is no use in thinking that not every man or women is the same and another player may be less-mature, because that standpoint pressures the event that I?m in currently and still creates these unfair social voids. You?ll find that adults will do more damage to others talking about pedophilia than pedophiles themselves; again, from my example, after talking to the child, one thinks that its? uncool and insults me with pedophile, that conversation then travels to everyone in the vicinity, and the space to improve on my act is remnant. What do these adults believe that they are doing when they play hero by having fun and earning money dictating social hatred toward people, who may be innocent, and could have come from these very mistakes.
I think that Habbo could add rooms that control the social circles, by hiring staff to teach or preach ideas that bring children and adults closer on a major-scale, so that there is more of a family atmosphere than a distant atmosphere during the minor times. I can safely talk to any child; when I talk to a child and the immediate thought from snot-nosed punks, social fiends or evil-minded people is not to insult me stupidly for the boosting of their own ego, and instead to treat it as friendly and fun banter, then the tension is down. Habbo should introduce education rooms, and hire staff that can teach adults and children how to be civil. You are not smarter than these words written before you, you are an egotistical human with a small-mind, debating this is wrathful-thinking, this is not a competition where you flaunt your masculinity, its? life. People have been helping their images by targeting the weaker mans? image for too long, adults should have to prove why they deserve childrens? respect and not simply select a figment of their imagination to attack. This does not mean I?m an advocate for child-abuse or under-age sex, it means I think that you adults are these evil concepts that you breathe into society, and without you there would be less-growth in such areas.
June 13th 2012 at 6:28am(+1 like)
I have to agree with Cait Chapman. I've been playing since 2005 - I don't play as much or at all as i used to - So that's almost 7 years and it has always been happening. There has always been those pathetic "Brothels". Moderation has always been terrible. Just can't believe it's taken this long for them to actually NOTICE what's been happening.
June 12th 2012 at 11:34pm
This is such a ridiculous report from channel 4. Of all the years I've had chatting with people, trading with people, playing with people etc, I've never came across habbo to be a "graphic" chat room. Furthermore, how does channel 4 even know that the people asking for indecent images of the girls they're talking to are actually pedophiles? This website is full of male teenagers who would like an easy way to try and get a way into viewing some graphic pictures from girls. This is what teenagers are like! Just because someone shouts out "HORNY GIRLS ADD ME FOR CAM " doesn't automatically mean they are a pedophile. Clearly channel 4 needs to investigate this more. The moderators show activity on a daily basis in order to keep Habbo Hotel a safe, fun and social community for teenagers on the internet. Obviously if you're under the age of 13, you must not be allowed to sign up onto habbo, and I admit, the moderators do need to do a bit of work on this. However, this is entirely based on common sense and logic, if a person asks for graphic images from you, who in the right mind would accept the offer?
It would be very sad if the closure of Habbo Hotel was to happen, the world's largest chat room that was created in 2001.
June 12th 2012 at 9:12pm(+3 likes)
I have to agree. I also joined Habbo in 2001 and it was a very different type of chatroom. Though some of this type of chatter went on it was moderated differently back then and they took things alot more seriously. It would seem like a mixture of Sulake allowing this and perhaps not caring about some of it. Ultimately Habbo was very popular even before they lowered the regulations on what could and couldn't be done/said on there but it would seem as if they were more interested in money than the progression of the users experience on the site. What there use to be about Habbo has been gone for allmost 3 years but what Channel 4 reported on was still a very small fraction of conversations made on Habbo. That being said, Only 80% of it is on habbo and non external and potentially is considered only "Cyber Sex" which in the early days of Habbo was against there policies on site.
June 13th 2012 at 1:53am
lets face it, the news concentrates on the bad things about habbo... obviously they were looking for this sort of stuff to post it. why would someone of that age go on it anyway? if someone is dumb enough to cam or cyber with someone then its their own fault for doing so. its not like they dont have a brain of their own. also if someone asks for that then yeah possibly they could be paedophiles or they can be horny teens wanting to get some. go on habbo and find the good stuff about it and dont focus on the bad. if you went to a normal room instead of searching sex related rooms then you wouldnt find such stuff. its mostly innocent chat with people you can relate to on there. play games etc. theres already people that have seen this on tv and are gutted about it.
Habbo names- Antiozonants and !Charlie.
June 12th 2012 at 8:22pm(+2 likes)