We Asked Roblox’s C.E.O. About Child Safety. It Got Tense.  ## Metadata - Author: [[Hard Fork]] - Full Title: We Asked Roblox’s C.E.O. About Child Safety. It Got Tense. - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/ea32ad58-9233-4071-a551-6f0586fd6c1c ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Safety Is Both Duty And Opportunity** - Roblox treats child-safety as both an obligation and a product opportunity to enable kids to build and socialize safely. - David Baszucki says the company has iterated safety systems since day one and continues to innovate at scale. Transcript: Kevin Roose And how do you think of the problem of predators on Roblox? David Baszucki We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well. How do we allow young people to build, communicate, and hang out together? How do we build the future of communication at the same time? So we've been, I think, in a good way working on this ever since we started. And when we were, this was almost 18 or 19 years ago, when we first launched the company, we had just four of us sitting in a room. We were literally the moderators. Like, we would rotate all the time. And so fast forward to where we are today. It's just like every week, what is the latest tech 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? And as you correctly know, we've just started adding that we're going to be using facial age estimation with AI to complement that. ([Time 0:10:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fc42980c-c291-48d8-a189-02cb1e90eee6)) - **Combine Signals For Age Estimation** - Use multiple signals rather than a single check to estimate user ages more accurately. - Baszucki says combine behavioral data, ID uploads, self-reported age, and ephemeral facial age estimation. Transcript: Kevin Roose That's correct. David Baszucki And I think long-term face scan isn't the only signal. Like mathematically, the more signals that are convoluted, the better the accuracy and the better we can get. So we already have signals. 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 that literally, you know, in an ephemeral way, use your phone, use your PC, scan an image, Do a good AI estimation, image isn't stored, and start using that to complement all the other things we do. And we already do a pile of stuff. We have very, very good text filters. We have very, very good, there's no image sharing. We're doing a bunch of monitoring. But adding one more signal to that can really help us make cool decisions. ([Time 0:11:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c69a62df-89e7-48c6-8119-27e17b0271b6)) - **User Base Is Aging Over Time** - Roblox's self-reported demographics have shifted toward older users over time. - Baszucki notes growth in users reporting 21+ and two-thirds reporting over 13. Transcript: David Baszucki This is really interesting, and I think this goes to what we've been saying for a while in that maybe for the last five to 10 years, people look at Roblox and say, well, these are kind of These primitive games and everyone on the platform is pretty young. 13 to now, I believe we recently said, self-reported almost two-thirds over 13. And we can see those numbers growing and growing. Like fastest growing segments on Roblox are 21 and up right now. Or at least people who say they're 21 and up. Yeah. Now, I think those numbers have a fair amount of current efficacy. We're obviously balancing those with the age estimation because we want a tighter estimation. But just looking at the size of the cohorts and the growth rates, there's a fair amount of accuracy to that. ([Time 0:13:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c15e2771-fe17-4583-aeab-75e3107a94bc)) - **One-Off Photo Checks Are Insufficient** - Single-photo age checks are easy to bypass with adversarial inputs or avatars. - Baszucki argues Roblox will use continuous and harder-to-fake signals like animated face data. Transcript: Kevin Roose How confident are you that your systems can avoid that kind of tingling? David Baszucki I think we have a lot of opportunity here in that we already have other signals that are maybe not as reliable, but when combined are very reliable. We also have the opportunity. This isn't just a one-time thing. Roblox experiences are you're holding a phone. In many cases, we can use signals from your phone or the camera to animate your face, for example. So this isn't kind of a one-stop shop thing. This is possibly checking as we go. If we see weird signals, do another age check as we go. So I'm pretty optimistic, kind of the more naive, like take a picture of that. We're going to go way beyond that. ([Time 0:14:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5c25e422-3a29-43f5-9019-9b1a785557f6)) - **Filters Were The Primary Early Defense** - Historically Roblox relied on restrictive text filters to protect minors in open chat. - Baszucki says filters evolved and the company focuses now on blocking adversarial attempts to bypass them. Transcript: David Baszucki I think we've always, from day one, really focused very heavily on quality of text filtering. And if anything, we've had very, very historically restrictive text filtering over time. One of the biggest complaints on Roblox and arguably trading, in a good way, safety for growth has been complaints of communication on the platform. Like there's a lot of Roblox memes and themes. If you go back and dig into them, everyone's just saying hashtag, hashtag, hashtag. And there's been a lot of- Because that's how you blur out words that aren't supposed to use. That's correct. So there's a lot of historical memes about historical hashtag, hashtag, hashtag. With AI, these filters have gotten better and better. 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, which we're getting better And better at as well. ([Time 0:15:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b86e441c-40ef-4cd8-80f9-393d547c1c02)) - **Flag Moves To Other Platforms** - Detect and block attempts to move conversations off-platform as a safety red flag. - Baszucki says obvious requests for external handles are simple red flags to target with filters. Transcript: Kevin Roose So like, what can you do in that regard? Like, you know, in my mind, if you see somebody chatting like, hey, like what's your Discord username, you know, and it's an adult talking to a minor, that seems like it's a red flag. Maybe you're doing some of that. David Baszucki 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, we're 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. ([Time 0:18:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/39ecb87b-e05a-40af-b774-7c025cef4df6)) - **Chat Enables Community, Not Just Gameplay** - Open communication is central to Roblox's social and creative value for kids. - Baszucki says chat helps isolated kids find community and is core to the platform's experience. Transcript: David Baszucki Highlight that a couple things. First, there's enormous benefits for having people be able to communicate. And we think we see those benefits. There's a lot of kids who find their peeps on Roblox. There's a lot of kids when they're lonely or isolated. Actually, I'm not going to use it as an excuse or anything, but I get a lot of calls from famous parents who said, look, my kid would be dead if it were not for finding a community on a platform Like Roblox to stay connected with. And I would also say we do take it as an enormous responsibility to design for not the sophisticated parent who goes in and says, look, I'm going to turn off who you can chat to and all of That. We have to design for all parents and think through that. But we do believe we have enormously great technology up and down the stack. We think it's part of building an experience like this. ([Time 0:20:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6cd7d0bf-aaa7-4037-901c-a613e1a5eca7)) - **Scale Changes The Safety Problem** - Roblox's scale makes its safety challenge qualitatively different from typical games. - Baszucki emphasizes 11 billion monthly hours and single experiences with millions of concurrent players. Transcript: David Baszucki Be experiencing similar safety challenges? I wouldn't categorize any of that. I would say we're at a scale that is somewhat mind-boggling, so I'm not going to run any excuse numbers of Roblox relative to any other platforms. But I would say at a scale of 11 billion hours is very different than a scale of 10 million hours. It's a thousand times that size of it. And I would say the scale we're at is quite enormous. It's 150 million people every day it's many more than that every month and relative to an individual game um the scale's enormous we we have experiences on our platform right now which Have 25 million people playing at the same time and traditionally in the gaming market the record prior to that i think was 11 or 12 for all of Fortnite. And prior to that, big numbers are considered a million for a single game. Like I remember when Minecraft hit a million users. So think about that, a whole platform at some point in time, like Minecraft hitting 1 million users, a single game on Roblox hitting 25 million users. ([Time 0:21:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2ca74c17-1939-4d61-9c69-7d0cda7fad34)) - **Use AI To Scale Moderation Effectively** - Prefer higher-quality automated systems when they can review more content accurately. - Baszucki argues AI-based review scales better than purely manual moderation at massive volumes. Transcript: David Baszucki Arguably, is it better to have AI systems reviewing every image, every piece of text, all of that, or to keep doing that manually? So I think that was a misnomer. And I think if you interview anyone in our safety team or safety systems, that would be just part of making our systems better. Casey Newton So just so I have the clear response, the argument is that the shift has been from a more manual safety team and system to a more automated review process that may do a better job, even if It costs less to operate. David Baszucki Yeah, I would actually lean in harder. The shift would be constantly moving to higher quality, more accurate, and more diligent systems? Can we review more? Can we do more better? And say you and I, we're a system, what is the best way to review every single image going into Roblox at higher and higher quality? And say we figured out the best way to do that is to do it with better and better AI models. ([Time 0:27:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d1e7ab67-4adc-4977-a65c-1af84a6bfc4d)) - **A CEO's Family Screen-Time Shift** - Baszucki says he relaxed screen-time limits across his children as they grew older. - He differentiates harmful screen time from social, day-time play with friends on platforms like Roblox. Transcript: David Baszucki When my son was really young, we had pretty radical screen time limits. And you can imagine as your parent, you have your second, third, and fourth kid, you loosen up on that. I'm actually kind of supportive of it in a way. And I think, I do think there's a bunch of contributing factors, like what is the ratio of blue light to non-blue light? How much of the screen time is solo consumption versus group consumption? What time of the day is the screen time? So I would say 2 a.m., heavy blue light, solo consumption, short form video, that's arguably a different type of screen time than, you know, noon with your friends for a while playing Hide and go seek. ([Time 0:37:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f5415493-62b3-4c78-a8bb-4009759e807f))