Roblox CEO insists platform is amazing for kids amid lawsuits and bans

Roblox CEO David Baszucki claims that the gaming platform is amazing for kids despite the company facing backlash regarding child safety and several lawsuits.

Baszucki made the claim on The New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast, where hosts Casey Newton and Kevin Roose questioned the CEO about Roblox’s new policy to increase child safety and reduce predatory activity amid open investigations and over 20 lawsuits.

Roblox is currently facing lawsuits from various states, including Florida, Louisiana and Texas. The game was also recently banned in Iraq, citing concerns regarding child safety as one of its main reasons.

“And how do you think of the problem of predators on Roblox?” Newton asked Baszucki. “We think of it not necessarily just as a problem but an opportunity as well … At the scale we’re at — 150 million daily actives, 11 billion hours a month — like, what is the best way to keep pushing this forward?” Baszucki answered.

“It does not seem like predators are having that hard of a time getting around your filters … So, I’m curious what’s made you so confident that things are working?” Newton asked. “I don’t want to comment on it,” Baszucki said.

“It’s one of the primary things we’re doing is trying to keep people on our platform.”

“You don’t think you have a problem with predators on the platform,” said Newton. “I think we’re doing an incredible job at innovating relative to the number of people on our platform and the hours, in really leaning into the future of how this is going to work,” said Baszucki.

CEO says security is developing on pace

Baszucki described various ways the company can implement AI and checks to verify age, saying, “We have behavioral signals; we have photo ID upload signals; we have user-suggested age. But we’re complementing that with a facial age estimation signal.”

One security measure Roblox already has is screening text with a filter; however, people have found ways to obfuscate this restriction by using a hashtag “because that’s how you blur out words that aren’t supposed to be used,” Newton said.

“The state of where we are now is primarily getting into the blocking of adversarial attempts to broach the filter and adversarial attempts to try to share PII [personally identifying information], which we’re getting better and better at as well,” said Baszucki.

Newton then asked Baszucki, “How do you as the CEO … feel like we’re applying the right number of resources and they have the right error rates and we’re at a place where I’m comfortable telling parents, ‘Bring your kids to Roblox?’”

“We see all of those metrics internally all the time. They’re not publicly shared. We’re watching filter rates. We’re watching this rate. We’re watching all of that rate. Those metrics constantly get better as we add more and more AI on top of it,” said Baszucki.

At the end of the podcast, Roose asked Baszucki whether Roblox would be able to fix the safety issues plaguing the platform in a year, which is also the same time his kid would turn four. “I’m going to go more out of the box than that. Roblox is an amazing platform right now for your kid. And I’m happy to go deep with you, possibly nondisclose you, show you metrics, all of that, to do whatever it takes to get you over the hump,” the CEO replied.