Weeks after a whistleblower posted about Mini World: Block Art being a haven for erotica and sexual predators, the game is observing a period of “rectification.”
A popular Chinese world-building game was removed from domestic app stores on Tuesday after struggling to remove erotic content and deter sexual predators.
The issues within Mini World: Block Art — which since its release in the summer of 2017 has been downloaded 50 million times on the Google Play store, and many more times on Chinese app stores — were brought to light on April 2 when a content creator called Little Scholar Xie Chenyuan posted about them on video-sharing site Bilibili.
In his video, Xie showed how user-created maps — custom-designed locations such as arenas within the game that can be shared with other players — were filled with erotica, displayed along rows of in-game blackboards. The vlogger also found boards inviting players to join erotic chat groups on Tencent-owned messaging app QQ by adding certain contacts.
Shortly after sending a friend request to one such account while posing as a 12-year-old girl, Xie was contacted by someone who claimed to be the same age. The new acquaintance urged Xie to undress and send nude photos.
Days after Xie posted his video, Mini World announced on its official Weibo microblog that it was aware of the issues and planned to address them by temporarily disabling “chat zones” within maps, stepping up supervision, and pursuing legal action against the worst offenders. However, the problems appear to have persisted. Continue to read the full article here.
– This article originally appeared on Sixth Tone.
