admin As “pedophile hellscape” Roblox finally adds a rudimentary measure to try to prevent children from being exploited via its network of games and chatrooms used by 151 million people, the company’s CEO spoke to the New York Times podcast Hard Fork about child safety. And it didn’t go great. It really didn’t go great.
Roblox is coming under increasing scrutiny after decades of failing to implement even the most basic of protective measures to keep its pre-teen players away from the networks of pedophiles who use the game to find victims. Described last year as “a pedophile hellscape for kids” by Hindenburg Research, the game quickly introduced a new assortment of measures last October that did next to nothing, leading this year to a great deal of legal interest. Three months back, the state of Louisiana announced its intentions to sue Roblox for the dangers it was allowing, joined since by Kentucky and Texas. These actions come alongside 35 other ongoing lawsuits, including one from only yesterday by a family in Cuyaho County following Roblox‘s alleged use in the tragic and too common abuse of their 13-year-old son.
On Wednesday of this week, Roblox announced it was beginning to roll out a new method of checking player ages before they could access chat, this time using facial recognition to try to restrict players to only talking to others in their age range. Such facial ID checks have become commonplace in the UK following the disastrously poor UK Online Safety Act, by which porn sites and other age-restricted outlets are required to verify users’ ages. This has led to sites like X, Bluesky and Discord also requiring British users to prove their age, usually by showing their face on camera in a measure that entirely thwarts all seven people who haven’t heard of a VPN.
Regarding this rollout, the New York Times‘ Casey Newton spoke to Roblox co-founder and CEO David Baszucki about the new plans, and whether they can really help. It doesn’t begin well. When asked about the “scope of the problem” of predators in the application, Baszucki came in shoulders first saying, “We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well.” Ah, the good ol’ opportunities available when your company’s product is rife with pedophilia. He continued, outlining how wonderful it is that young people can build and communicate together, how they have “150 million daily actives, 11 billion hours a month, like what is the best way to keep pushing this forward.” It is the most astonishingly tone-deaf response.
Newton attempts to get some sensible answers from Baszucki about how the ID checks will work, and why they won’t be as easily evaded as so many others, and amidst Baszucki’s corporate waffle he’s told that Roblox is apparently always looking out for “weird signals” and will ask for further age verification should these appear, although he didn’t explain what those signals might be, nor what these further checks would be. But then Newton goes on to ask the painfully necessary question: why has it taken 19 years to even try to stop adults from being able to speak to children?
Baszucki responds by talking about the evolution of Roblox‘s text filtering tech for inappropriate language and personally identifying information over the last two decades, and how it’s always improving, which is great but clearly not relevant to the question. Newton is having none of it, responding, “Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. When I read these lawsuits and these investigations into the company, 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?” Baszucki’s response is incoherent.
“I don’t want to comment on it. We do see the chat logs of those. And we can see interesting and, many times, ways of people trying to—I’d say, many times people who are fairly sophisticated, and I’m not going to say all of them, many times kids who are over 13, who actually in any other app are not running in a filtered situation, unfortunately, figuring out how to jump to some other platform where they can communicate unfiltered, where they can share images, all of it. It’s one of the primary things we’re doing is trying to keep people on our platform. It’s an interesting industry situation. I would say, we’re not waiting for the rest of the industry. We’re like, we’re always trying to stay ahead of it. On the California age-appropriate design code, for example, we’re like, we are already doing all of that stuff. And the same thing with age estimation: We’re not doing this because of any laws that are coming, we think it’s the right thing to do.”
Newton very impressively keeps his cool, and rather than pointing out that this answer had nothing to do with the situation, nor indeed how unbelievable it is that the CEO of the company would say “I don’t want to comment on it” when asked why he’s confident in age tech that clearly doesn’t work, he instead points out that the lawsuits are demonstrating that “Roblox is kind of, you know, where predators go to find kids.”
Things become increasingly tense, as Baszucki tries to claim this is a misrepresentation, and when pressed on whether he truly doesn’t believe Roblox has a predator problem replies, “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 in to the future of how this is going to work.”
What becomes so grimly apparent is that even now, even after a year of extraordinary scrutiny and legal pressure, Baszucki still doesn’t have a grip on the situation at all. To be so ill-prepared for such obvious questions, to have no coherent responses for why the new tech will be effective, and to go so out of his way to appear so uninterested in the subject, is astonishing. As he’s pressed further on the ease with which predators can suggest children speak to them on another platform, Baszucki eventually unravels into literal gibberish:
“I would actually say that is a very simple red flag. Like, that sounds like text filter many prior generations. So I would say the techniques are much more sophisticated than that. We’re constantly getting better than that and sometimes it’s adversarial. Like, we’re getting into, you know, if we cryptographically were going to try to have an exchange of how to share your Snap handle or whatever handle. We see some of that starting, like things we’ll have to essentially prevent in the future.”
The CEO seems to believe that the scale of Roblox is somehow an excuse to justify its problems, repeatedly coming back to its 150 million users and 11 billion hours a month, as if this explains it all away. But more problematically, as Newton points out that the company wants those numbers to grow, Baszucki immediately switches back to talking about what an amazing financial opportunity this is. Given Roblox is really struggling to turn those users into money, it reads like he’s only speaking to investors and analysts who are increasingly concerned about Roblox‘s lack of profits. So many responses begin with an infuriatingly irrelevant attempt to avoid the question, and then end with words like “And you could imagine Roblox at 20-X this scale, having 50 percent of the gaming market space all in a single place.” It’s so crass!
But not nearly as crass as Baszucki’s response to a question over the Hindenburg Research report into the scale of the issue with pedophiles. Hindenburg was an activist short-selling research firm that would investigate companies for fraud, malfeasance and indeed rampant use by predators, until its creator chose to disband the group in January this year. At the time of the report, Baszucki said that it was wrong to claim that Roblox had reduced its spend on trust and safety, so Newton asked for specifics.
“Fun,” says Baszucki, a man who appears pathologically incapable of reading the room. “Let’s keep going down this. And so, first off, Hindenburg is not longer in existence, correct? So, you should report on that. They went out of business for some reason…” He then demanded to know if Newton had researched the answer for himself, before saying that it’s because they’ve moved so much of the safety regulation onto AI, all while sounding absolutely furious that he was being asked. He then demands that Newton agree that if AI is more effective, it’s better to use it, and when Newton does, Baszucki starts to behave incredibly immaturely. “Good, so you’re aligning with what we did. High-five.” Then when Newton tries to ask a question, he interrupts to say, “Thank you for supporting our Roblox decision matrix.” Then interrupts yet again to say, “I’m so glad you guys are aligned with the way we run Roblox. High-five.” Think he’s done? Nope. Yet again he interrupts the question with, “Is this a stealth interview where actually you love everything we’re doing and you’re here to stealthily support it?”
And he doesn’t stop. When co-host Kevin Roose tried to get things back on the rails, Baszucki kept going with the same pathetic line. Challenged on how AI has proved very ineffective for social media companies, he just carries on saying it. The only thing that stopped this tantrum was allowing the CEO to talk about Polymarket, a cryptoscam-based prediction market, letting people place bets on things as ridiculous as awards ceremonies and future weather patterns. Some believe it’s becoming a useful way to predict markets, and that group includes Baszucki who is…and I cannot believe I’m typing this…looking to put it into Roblox so children can gamble.
He wants to find a way to do this that’s “legal” and “educational,” at which point the podcast hosts begin openly mocking the stupidity. And then, thank god, they run out of time.
