How Section 230, Billion-Dollar Platforms, and a Broken Legal Framework Let 764 Hunt Your Children in Plain Sight
James was 17 years old.
For nearly 20 hours, an online network called 764 attacked, threatened, and terrorized him. Every time he tried to fight back — every time he asked why they were doing this, every time he begged them to leave him alone — they escalated. They coerced him into acts of self-harm. They recorded it. They used it to blackmail him further.
James died by suicide. His mother Tamia found him at home.
She stood before Congress and told them what happened to her son. She was not the only parent in that room. She will not be the last.
And while she spoke, Discord had $561 million in annual revenue. Roblox had nearly $5 billion. Both platforms were named by the FBI as primary hunting grounds for 764 and similar networks. Both platforms continue to hide behind a piece of legislation written in 1996, when the internet was a toddler and no one had yet imagined what it would become.
This is the story of how we got here. And why the people with the power to stop it are choosing not to.
James died by suicide. His mother found him at home. And the platforms keep collecting their billions.
What 764 Actually Is
Before we talk about money and law and corporate accountability, we need to be clear about what we’re actually discussing. Because 764 is not a trolling group. It is not edgy teenagers being cruel online. It is a designated terrorist network.
The FBI classifies 764 as a tier one investigative matter — the same designation as major organized crime. Canada has formally designated it a terrorist organization. The United States Department of Justice describes it as a new form of modern-day terrorism that specifically targets children.
764 operates through gaming platforms, messaging apps, and social media. Its members target vulnerable children and teenagers — particularly those showing signs of trauma, social isolation, or mental health struggles. They are deliberately chosen because they are easier to manipulate.
The grooming process is systematic. Predators make contact through in-game chats, presenting as friends or romantic interests. Once trust is established, the coercion begins. Children are pressured into producing sexually explicit images. They are blackmailed with that material. They are pushed toward escalating acts of self-harm — cutting, burning, worse — and forced to record it on camera while 764 members watch live. The more degrading the content a member can coerce a child into producing, the higher their standing within the network.
The FBI has opened more than 350 active investigations tied to 764. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is on track to receive nearly 2,000 reports of abuse connected to 764 or similar networks this year alone. A 10-year-old girl in Norway. A teenager in New Brunswick. A 17-year-old boy whose mother now testifies before Congress.
These are not statistics. These are children.
764 is not trolling. It is a FBI-designated tier one terrorist network that specifically hunts vulnerable children.
The Platforms Where It Thrives — And What They Earned While It Did
764 does not operate in the dark web. It operates on Discord. On Roblox. On platforms that hundreds of millions of people — including children — use every single day. And those platforms have generated extraordinary revenue while children were being groomed on them.
Let’s look at the numbers.
Discord generated an estimated $561 million in revenue in 2025 — a 29% year-over-year increase. The platform is valued at $15 billion. It has 200 million monthly active users. And it is the platform where 764 was founded. Discord’s own moderation strategy for years has relied primarily on user reports — meaning a child being coerced and blackmailed is expected to be the one who triggers intervention. 764’s founder had his accounts banned repeatedly, usually within a day, and simply created new ones. The platform that enabled this is now worth fifteen billion dollars.
Roblox generated $4.891 billion in annual revenue in 2025 — a 35.77% increase year-over-year. It has over 150 million daily active users, a significant portion of whom are children. The FBI has explicitly named Roblox as a primary entry point for 764 predators, who use in-game chats to make initial contact with victims before moving them to private messaging apps where the grooming escalates. Roblox made nearly five billion dollars in the year the FBI confirmed it had opened over 350 investigations tied to networks using its platform as a hunting ground.
These are not struggling startups without resources. These are some of the most financially successful technology companies in the world. The argument that they cannot afford better safeguards is not available to them.
They are making a calculation. And the calculation is that reactive moderation — waiting for reports, banning accounts after the fact, issuing press statements about community safety — is cheaper than proactive child protection. Age verification systems cost money. Human review teams cost money. Robust identity verification costs money.
Children being groomed and exploited on their platforms? That costs nothing. Not legally. Not yet.
Discord: $561 million revenue in 2025. Roblox: $4.891 billion. Both platforms named by the FBI as primary 764 hunting grounds. Neither legally required to do more.
The Shield: What Section 230 Actually Says
To understand why platforms face so little legal consequence, you need to understand Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — a piece of legislation passed in 1996 that has become the primary legal armor protecting billion-dollar technology companies from accountability for what happens on their platforms.
At its core, Section 230 says this: no provider of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of information provided by another user. In plain language — if someone posts something harmful on your platform, you are not legally responsible for it.
In 1996, this made sense. The internet was new. Online platforms were genuinely small and genuinely fledgling. The concern was that holding websites legally responsible for every piece of user-generated content would make it impossible to build anything. The intent was to allow the internet to grow while giving platforms some protection from being sued into oblivion for things their users did.
Nearly thirty years later, Section 230 is still on the books. Almost unchanged. And the “fledgling startups” it was designed to protect are now among the most powerful and profitable corporations in the history of human commerce.
The gap between what Section 230 was designed to do and what it now enables is not a gray area. It is a canyon. And children are falling into it.
Section 230 was written in 1996 to protect fledgling startups. It is now the primary legal shield for billion-dollar corporations avoiding accountability for child exploitation.
The Shield in Practice: When Platforms Know and Do Nothing
The most damning example of Section 230’s real-world consequences is not hypothetical. It is documented. It went to federal court. And the platform won.
Twitter — now X — received repeated alerts that child sexual abuse material depicting specific minor victims was on its platform. In response, Twitter asked one victim to verify their age. He did. Twitter confirmed he was a minor. Twitter reviewed the content showing coerced sexual acts involving minors. Twitter then decided, in their own words, that “no action will be taken.”
The videos continued to proliferate. Twitter continued to profit from the traffic. It took a Department of Homeland Security official personally intervening to get the content removed.
The victims sued. Twitter claimed Section 230 immunity. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed — ruling that Section 230 protects platforms even from civil penalties for the knowing possession and distribution of child sexual abuse material.
Read that again. A platform reviewed child sexual abuse material. Verified the victim was a minor. Chose to take no action. Profited from it. And was legally protected from consequence.
This is not a theoretical abuse of the law. This is the law operating exactly as courts have interpreted it. The legal framework as it currently exists does not require a platform to act even when it knows children are being exploited on it. It requires only that the platform not be the one who created the content.
Discord’s founder created 764. But Discord didn’t create 764’s content. Discord just provided the infrastructure, the private servers, the largely unmoderated spaces where it grew and spread and found new victims. Under current Section 230 interpretation, that distinction is enough to avoid liability.
Twitter reviewed CSAM. Verified the victim was a minor. Took no action. Profited from it. Courts ruled Section 230 protected them. This is the law working as written.
The Cracks in the Shield — And Why They’re Not Enough
The legal landscape is beginning to shift. Slowly. Unevenly. Driven not by legislative courage but by individual families with the resources and the fury to take billion-dollar corporations to court.
In March 2026, a California jury found Meta and YouTube liable for addictive platform features that caused mental health distress to a child. In April 2026, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court allowed a similar suit to proceed, rejecting Meta’s Section 230 immunity defence. Courts are beginning to find that platform design choices — algorithmic amplification, engagement optimization, features that exploit neurological vulnerability — fall outside Section 230’s protection because the platform itself created those features. The third-party content shield doesn’t cover first-party design decisions.
This is important. But it is not enough.
These cases are fought one family at a time. Each one requires enormous resources, years of litigation, and the willingness to relive the worst experience of your life in a courtroom while a corporate legal team argues that the platform bears no responsibility. Tamia Woods, who lost her son James to 764, should not have to become a litigant to force a platform to protect children. She should not have to testify before Congress just to get lawmakers to ask the FBI what they already know.
Bipartisan legislation has been introduced to sunset Section 230 entirely — forcing platforms to either negotiate meaningful reforms or lose absolute immunity. The argument from sponsors is direct: Big Tech has spent a decade claiming to support reform in public while their lobbyists fight it behind the scenes. An expiration date creates genuine urgency.
It has not passed. The lobbying infrastructure of billion-dollar technology companies is substantial. The urgency of grieving parents is real but episodic — it spikes when a child dies and fades when the news cycle moves on.
The platforms are counting on that.
What Could Actually Be Done
This is not a problem without solutions. The solutions are implementable. The resources to implement them exist. What has been missing is the legal obligation to act.
Mandatory age verification. If a platform hosts content or communities accessible to children, it must verify that users are who they claim to be. This is not technically impossible. Banking institutions verify identity. Medical platforms verify identity. The argument that gaming and social platforms cannot do the same is a choice, not a technical limitation.
Proactive detection systems. Content ID technology already exists — platforms use it to protect copyright. The same infrastructure can be used to detect known child sexual abuse material and flag accounts engaging in grooming patterns. Roblox and Discord have the technical capacity. They have chosen not to deploy it comprehensively because a comprehensive deployment costs money.
Platform liability for knowing inaction. When a platform is informed that child sexual abuse material is on its servers and takes no action, it should face civil and criminal consequences. The Twitter case demonstrated that current law does not require this. The law needs to change. A platform that knows and does nothing is not a neutral host. It is a participant.
Upload frequency and behavior monitoring. 764 operates by moving victims rapidly from public platforms to private spaces. Anomalous patterns — accounts that mass-contact minors, that escalate to private messaging, that exhibit grooming behavioural signatures — are detectable. Platforms have the data. They need the obligation to act on it.
Meaningful transparency reporting. Platforms should be legally required to publicly report the number of child safety reports received, the response time, and the outcome. Sunlight is a disinfectant. Accountability requires visibility.
None of these solutions is radical. All of them are within the technical and financial capacity of platforms earning hundreds of millions to billions of dollars annually. The missing ingredient is not capability. It is a consequence.
Roblox earned $4.891 billion in 2025. Discord earned $561 million. The argument that they cannot afford to protect children is not available to them.
The Counsellor’s Lens: Who 764 Targets and Why It Works
There is a clinical dimension to this conversation that rarely makes it into mainstream coverage, and it is important.
764 does not target children randomly. It targets children who are already struggling. Those showing signs of depression, anxiety, social isolation, trauma history, family instability. These are children whose nervous systems are already in threat response — who are already operating from a place of diminished safety and heightened need for connection and belonging.
The grooming process exploits exactly those vulnerabilities. The initial contact feels like finally being seen. The early relationship feels like genuine care. By the time the coercion begins, the child has already formed an attachment that makes resistance extraordinarily difficult. This is not weakness on the part of the victim. This is predatory manipulation, precisely calibrated by people who have studied what works.
When we ask why children don’t just log off, don’t just tell a parent, don’t just report it — we are asking the wrong question. We are asking why a traumatized child in the grip of sophisticated psychological manipulation doesn’t access resources they may not trust, reach out to adults who may not be safe, and resist an attachment that feels like the only warmth they’ve found.
The platforms know their user base includes these children. They know what the research says about vulnerable adolescents and online exploitation. They continue to design for engagement over safety because engagement generates revenue and safety generates cost.
That is a choice. It should be treated as one.
The Ask
Tamia Woods stood before Congress and said: “I couldn’t live with myself not making this personal now. I’m making it public. Because if I read a story like James’s after James had passed, and I did nothing — we failed him.”
She is making it public. We are making it public.
Because the alternative is waiting for the next family to find their child and then stand in a hearing room and beg corporations worth billions of dollars to care enough to act.
Section 230 was written to protect a free and open internet. It is now being used to protect billion-dollar corporations from accountability for knowingly hosting the systematic sexual exploitation and psychological destruction of children. The law is thirty years old. The platforms it is shielding are thirty times more powerful than anything its authors could have imagined.
Discord made $561 million in 2025. Roblox made $4.891 billion. Neither is legally required to verify the age of their users. Neither faces meaningful civil liability for knowing inaction. Neither operates under a legal framework that treats the death of a child on their platform as their problem.
That is not a technical limitation. That is a policy choice. And policy choices can be changed.
Reform Section 230. Create platform liability for knowing inaction. Mandate age verification. Require proactive detection. Make transparency reporting legally binding. Give victims the right to sue.
And to every parent, educator, counsellor, and human being reading this — make noise. The platforms are counting on the noise dying down. The lobbyists are counting on Congress moving on to the next crisis. The legal teams are counting on individual families running out of resources before the case concludes.
Don’t let them count on your silence.
James deserved better. So does the next child. And the one after that.
Yup. We said that.
If you believe a child is being exploited online, report immediately to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at CyberTipline.org or call 1-800-THE-LOST. In Canada, report to Cybertip.ca. Do not delete any evidence before contacting law enforcement.
