TBD Tries…Roblox

Summary

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What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future

Episode: TBD Tries…Roblox
Host: Lizzie O’Leary
Date: May 17, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, host Lizzie O’Leary and the What Next: TBD team dive into the world of Roblox — not only as a gaming platform, but as a cultural phenomenon now deeply entangled in debates about children’s safety online. Through hands-on experiments, expert interviews, and personal stories, the show explores Roblox’s explosive popularity, the persistent dangers facing kids online, and the platform’s push to keep its youngest users safe through new age verification systems. The conversation raises critical questions: Is Roblox genuinely doing enough to protect kids? Are parents and regulators asking the right questions? And what does the push for tighter safety controls mean for privacy and identity online?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Is Roblox and Why Does It Matter?

• Not Just a Game:
  • "Roblox is not a video game as much as it's like a mall for video games." (Cecilia Donostasio, 02:12)
  • The platform offers a vast array of experiences: role plays, simulators, and meme-driven games, like the show’s test-run of "Steal a Brain Rot," which is popular among kids for its chaotic, creative play.
• Impressive Reach:
  • Launched in 2006, Roblox now boasts almost 150 million daily users, with its influence surging during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Lizzie O’Leary, 02:44)
• Cultural Impact:
  • For many kids, Roblox is a key cultural touchstone, with game events creating real-life drama in classrooms and on playgrounds.
  • "I've seen Reddit posts of parents just being like, oh my God, how do I mediate this fight my child is having with this other student on the playground at school because of this thing that happened in Roblox." (Cecilia, 03:03)

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2. Kids, Safety, and the Real Risks on Roblox

• Familiar Online Dangers:
  • The platform faces lawsuits and public scrutiny for allegedly failing to keep kids safe from grooming and predation, with headlines and attorney general lawsuits often calling Roblox a “breeding ground for sexual predators.” (Matt Kaufman quoting lawsuits, 04:33)
• What Makes Roblox Different?
  • “You actually see people posting on Darknet fora about going into Roblox intentionally and finding children there intentionally because that's where the children are to be found.” (Cecilia, 05:06)
• Safety Challenges:
  • Predators often encourage children to move conversations off Roblox and onto less-regulated platforms, like Discord or Snapchat, reducing Roblox’s visibility into harmful interactions (Cecilia, 30:47).
• Parental Perspectives:
  • Interview with Mary Harris and her daughter Stella (11) highlights a “critical thinking, not just control” model for allowing kids on Roblox (12:41).
  • Stella’s experience: the worst she’s seen is people “fake kissing” in chat — awkward, not dangerous (13:53).

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3. Roblox’s Response: Age Verification & Parental Controls

• New Safety Tools:
  • Roblox now requires age verification — via ID upload or facial recognition — for key features like chat and for content access (15:28).
  • Parental controls now offer three levels of age-appropriate content (minimal, mild, moderate). Parents can approve what their kids see and do, or rely on system defaults.
• Testing the Barriers:
  • The producers attempted to bypass age verification:
    • Using a real adult face? System blocks.
    • AI-generated fake IDs or face filters? Blocked.
    • Drawing a face on a thumb (TikTok hack)? Blocked.
    • After multiple creative attempts, the team couldn’t crack Roblox’s protections, but noted persistent reports online about kids beating such systems (study: 1/3 of UK kids succeed, 19:15-19:55).
    • “We did not crack the software.” (Lizzie O’Leary, 19:12)

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4. Industry and Platform Accountability

• Roblox Leadership Speaks:
  • Matt Kaufman (Chief Safety Officer, Roblox):
    • Roblox is unique in being transparent about its youth audience and setting proactive controls: “Roblox is the only, you know, large platform of our size, gaming platform that is honest about the fact that you have kids and young teens signing up.” (28:19)
    • Defends speed and reasoning behind recent safety enhancements, likening it to how seatbelts became widely adopted as technology and understanding evolved (25:34 and 37:10).
    • The balance between default protections and customizable parental controls is necessary given varying levels of parental engagement (24:00).
• Critiques of Pace:
  • Roblox is under legal and public pressure for being “too late” with protections (25:02).
    • Kaufman’s analogy: you can’t criticize for not having today’s tools in the past.
• Scrutiny and Growth:
  • “The more safe Roblox is and the more it's trusted by our users and our parents, the more Roblox will grow.” (Matt Kaufman, 29:20)

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5. Are Current Safety Solutions Enough?

• Industry Standards & Transparency:
  • Munmun Dushoudri (Georgia Tech):
    • Calls for effectiveness standards for safety features such as age verification (32:13).
    • Argues for a proactive approach, drawing parallels to email spam filtering: “If you didn’t do anything, the spammers have the upper hand...we need to be thinking prospectively about as newer platforms come, how are they similar or different?... How do we get ahead of the curve, and that's what we would need.” (33:15)
• Privacy/Identity Risks:
  • Age checks often rely on third-party vendors, raising risks of data breaches and exposing personal information (Cecilia, 35:22).
  • For some, strict ID-based verification may threaten privacy or even safety if their identity doesn’t match—concerns flagged for gender diverse users and others (36:37).
    • “Vulnerable people always have more at stake when it comes to sharing information about themselves with tech platforms, period.” (Cecilia, 36:47)
• Real-world Tradeoffs:
  • Kaufman likens imperfect age checks to seatbelts; not flawless, but meaningfully better than nothing, and users always have the option to abstain in exchange for more limited access (37:10).

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6. Looking Forward: New Policies and User Perspectives

• Upcoming Changes:
  • Roblox is soon splitting child accounts into two tiers (ages 5–8 and 9–15), with age-based content gating set by default (38:34).
• Kids’ Views:
  • Stella values anonymity (“the entire point is so that you can literally be whatever,” 39:02), yet plans to keep using Roblox for connection until she "graduates" to other platforms (39:34).
  • She’s critical: “The people running Roblox are just doing a terrible job at making it better. And I have so many ideas on how they can fix it.” (Stella, 39:45)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Roblox as a culture-shaper:
  • “For people who are younger, it is one of the biggest cultural forces out there.” (Cecilia, 03:03)
• On Roblox's approach to safety:
  • “We always respect parents decisions...but you also want to set defaults on the platform that makes sense for everyone, even if the parent isn't as involved.” (Matt Kaufman, 24:00)
• Parenting in the Roblox Age:
  • “I know Stella too, and I know what she's interested in and, like, what boundaries she'll push...But that may be a false sense of security. I just don't know.” (Mary Harris, 12:53)
• On the privacy risks of age checks:
  • “A lot of these companies are relying on these third party vendors to do age verification. And there have been some significant data breaches with those vendors...” (Cecilia, 35:22)
• User skepticism:
  • “Like the entire point of Roblox is having these avatars and not knowing who the person is... The entire point is so that you can literally be whatever.” (Stella, 39:02)

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Important Timestamps

• [02:12] Definition of Roblox as a “mall for video games” (Cecilia)
• [03:03] Cultural impact on kids/schoolyard drama
• [05:06] Detailed risks—why predators target Roblox (Cecilia)
• [10:40] Stella and Mary Harris join to discuss the family approach to Roblox
• [13:53] Stella shares her awkward (but benign) experience on Roblox
• [15:28] Roblox’s “safety gold standard” — age verification explained and tested
• [19:12] “We did not crack the software” — results of trying to fool Roblox's protections
• [22:18] Matt Kaufman, Roblox’s Chief Safety Officer, speaks
• [25:02] Roblox faces criticism for speed of implementing safety measures
• [29:20] Why Roblox “embraces scrutiny”
• [32:13] Munmun Dushoudri on the need for safety standardization
• [35:22] Privacy and identity risks of age verification (Cecilia)
• [39:02] Stella’s take on Roblox and anonymity

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Episode Tone

• Curious, Skeptical, Candid: Lizzie O’Leary leads with a mix of outsider curiosity, critical questioning, and playful banter. The show remains accessible while welcoming nuanced, expert perspectives and centering the real voices of parents and kids.

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This episode offers a balanced, probing look at Roblox as a microcosm of broader debates about kids, safety, technology, and identity — capturing both the platform’s outsized role in young people’s lives and the complicated, imperfect efforts to make those spaces safe.

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Transcript

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[Lizzie O'Leary]

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[Lizzie O'Leary]

I am not a gamer, so when I sat down with the producers of our show, Evan and Patrick, to play some Roblox, I was a bit out of my depth.

[Evan Campbell]

Bananita Dolfinit.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Wait, wait, are the Is that a brain rot or is that another person?

[Amazon Pharmacy Announcer]

Yeah, this is a brain rot. So this is like a con. It's like a conveyor belt that's like

[Lizzie O'Leary]

ballerina, crocodile, or whatever. Yep, I know. I merged two memes there. Give me a break, I'm 50. Anyway, we were playing one of the most popular games on one of the most popular platforms in the world, Roblox. The game is called Steal a Brain Rot, and you compete against other people to steal their brain rots. You can whack somebody with a bat if you want. Steal a Brain Rot is fun, but it's not entirely representative of what Roblox is.

[Cecilia Donostasio]

Roblox is not a video game as much as it's like a mall for video games.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

That's Cecilia Donostasio. She writes about Roblox, among other things for Bloomberg.

[Cecilia Donostasio]

Maybe that game is Bee Swarm Simulator, where you pretend to be part of a beast swarm. Maybe you're role playing a girl in a high school for fairies. Maybe you're flinging yourself downstairs over and over again. Or you're playing Steal a Brain Rot where you're stealing these AI generated memes from other players who are playing the game with you.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Roblox launched in 2006, and its popularity has only skyrocketed in the past few years. Today, the platform has almost 150 million daily users. It really blew up during COVID and its cultural influence has grown beyond its digital borders.

[Cecilia Donostasio]

I think that for adults, it's a little difficult to discern the sort of cultural impacts of Roblox from cultural impacts of gaming culture at large. But for people who are younger, it is one of the biggest cultural forces out there. Kids who are playing steal a brain rot in Roblox and they have their brain rot stolen by a classmate. I've seen Reddit posts of parents just being like, oh my God, how do I mediate this fight my child is having with this other student on the playground at school because of this thing that happened in Roblox.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

But it's not just fights trickling out to the playground. Kids are facing many of the same risks on Roblox that people have faced on the Internet forever. And Cecilia knows this better than anyone else. Two years ago she co wrote a story for Bloomberg titled Roblox's Pedophile Problem. It detailed how young children were groomed on the platform by adults. Since then, Roblox has become a key part of the debate over keeping kids safe online. It's been the target of lawsuits from state attorneys general and individuals alike who allege that Roblox is not not doing enough to keep kids safe.

[Stella Dove]

Tonight, the children's gaming app Roblox put on notice by Florida's Attorney General.

[Matt Kaufman]

Yesterday, the Lone Star Attorney General announced a lawsuit against video game company Roblox, alleging the company failed to protect minors from sexually explicit content exploitation and grooming. Iowa AG Brenner Byrd's lawsuit alleges the

[Lizzie O'Leary]

platform created a quote, breeding ground for sexual predators. Is there something particular about Roblox that makes it somehow less safe than other platforms or multiplayer games? Or is it really just the sort of kids talking to each other level of trust that is there that seems, I hate to use this word, but attractive to people who want to infiltrate that world?

[Cecilia Donostasio]

I've done a lot of reporting on child predation that's existed on a lot of different games platforms. So of course we have to answer what makes Roblox different? Is there anything that does make Roblox different? And what we found was that you actually see people posting on Darknet fora about going into Roblox intentionally and finding children there intentionally because that's where the children are to be found.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Today on the show, TBD tries Roblox in the swirl of concern about child online safety. Roblox is a big target. Is it actually creating an unsafe space for kids or are we focused on the wrong thing? I'm Lizzie o' Leary and you're listening to TBD tries from what Next TBD. This episode is brought to you by Bill, the intelligent finance platform that helps businesses and accounting firms scale with proven results. Here at what Next tbd, we know business and in businesses across America, smart people are stuck doing the grunt work. You know the drill. Those hours when you could be brainstorming big ideas, you're instead filling in spreadsheets, filling out invoices, or hunting down somebody else's signature. Bill wants to change that. With AI powered automation, Bill removes the busywork from your accounts payables workflow. They handle capturing invoices, routing approvals, and syncing with your accounting software so that your team can focus on growth instead of paperwork. Bill is so reliable, 98 of the top 100 accounting firms in the US trust it to simplify and secure their bill payment processes. Bill's handled over a trillion dollars in secure payments and is ranked number one overall on G2's 2025 list of best account finance products. So stop the guesswork and start scaling with the proven choice. Go with a company whose financial infrastructure is trusted by nearly half a million customers. Ready to talk with an expert? Visit bill.comproven and get a $150 gift card as a thank you. That's bill.comproven terms and conditions apply. See Offer page for details. This episode is brought to you by AT&T business during Small Business Month. Starting your own business is never easy. Starting your own podcast? That seems easy, but actually there are a ton of landmines to step on along the way. Finding producers, selling ads, connecting to WI fi. Oh, does that sound straightforward? It's not talking about sitting in coffee houses for hours after buying one scone. I'm talking about sitting in hotel lobbies and pretending your backpack is luggage. It's torture. I spent so much time making my home office look professional, but my connection didn't get the memo. The last thing you want during a major interview is for your guest's voice to turn into a stutter. When your bandwidth can't keep up with your ambition, your home office starts feeling like an amateur operation pretty fast. And for a podcast, the Internet is key because the Internet is how we talk to almost everyone. And no matter the guest, a laggy connection can ruin an exclusive interview. Great connectivity isn't a bonus, it's the whole game. And ATT business is a reliable provider for small business owners. For Small Business Month, we celebrate small businesses by helping them run better. This means reliable uptime, easy switching, smart communications AT&T business built to work. Get att [e-mail]. You ever realize how many customers slip through the cracks? Missed calls, follow ups that never happen. It adds up fast. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q U o the business communication system built so you never miss a call. Your entire team can handle calls and texts from one shared number, so no more missed messages or dropped conversations. Everyone sees the full thread, replies are faster and customers actually feel taken care of. Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2 with over 3,000 reviews. Built for how modern teams work, more than 90,000 businesses, from solo operators to growing teams, rely on it to stay connected, professional and consistently reachable. Quo works wherever you are, right from your phone or computer. Keep your existing number, add teammates in minutes, sync your CRM and let the call routing handle itself as you scale. It's easy. Calls, texts, voicemails, transcripts and contact details all in one clean view so your team always has the full picture and can show up for every customer conversation, ensuring a seamless and more personalized experience. Experience Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try quo for free plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com TBD that's qU-U-O.com TBD. The Roblox universe is enormous. There are games for kids, there are games marketed to adults, but for this episode we are sticking to the kids stuff. And since I am a mere adult, I found a friend. Well, actually two.

[Mary Harris]

I'm Mary Harris and I host the other what Next.

[Stella Dove]

I'm Stella Dove. I'm her daughter, but I also sort of have a few episodes on a podcast on YouTube. Check it out.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Stella is 11 and she got her start on Roblox not too long ago.

[Stella Dove]

Yeah, December 2024. I remember the day. Well, I don't remember the exact day, but I remember how the day went where it was like my friend Josephine is always playing Minecraft and Roblox and I want to hang out with my friends. So I first started off with Minecraft, but then I realized it cost money. So then I was like, oh, Roblox is free, it's simple. And then I sort of joined. I friended my friend Josephine and

[Lizzie O'Leary]

now

[Stella Dove]

I mostly just play with her and like a few other friends.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Since my kid is five and barely allowed on the Internet at all, I wanted to ask Mary how she and her husband approached Stella's Internet use. Before Stella started playing Roblox. What conversations, if any, did you and Mark have with her

[Mary Harris]

very few. But I feel like that's mostly because she has a much older brother who went through Covid online. And she began playing it, as she said, with her friend Josephine, who she was hanging out with a lot in the afternoons. And Josephine's father would play with them. And so we sort of did this slow slide into Roblox and then it was just a thing that existed in our lives. But I feel like both. Cause we have the older kid and because she was playing with someone where we knew an adult would play with them on occasion, we were like, oh, this is probably fine. This is probably fine.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

It sounds like Mary, the approach that you guys have taken is much more critical thinking versus restrictive parental controls. Is that accurate?

[Mary Harris]

Yeah, that would be accurate. Do I worry about her safety? Probably not as much as I should. Just because, like, stuff exists in the world just because, like, I am looser because it's my second kid. But I also kind of know. I know Stella too, and, like, I know what she's interested in and, like, what boundaries she'll push. Where I get concerned is when, like, people might be pushing boundaries on her. You know what I mean? Because she, like, she knows her own internal compass really well. And so knowing that about her, I feel like I can trust her more with things. But that may be a false sense of security. I just don't know.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Stella says she's never seen anything so bad it would worry her parents, but she has felt some awkwardness.

[Stella Dove]

Okay, so one time I saw in this high school role play. This is so stupid. This is really weird. People were literally in the chat, fake kissing. And it was so weird. I was walking down the stairs and I just turned my screen and I looked under the stairs and there were these two people with, like, heart kissy emojis. And the stupidest part about it was they were in the public chat and they were saying, I hope no one finds us under the stairs. You're saying that on the public chat.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

But we wouldn't be here if it was just fake kissing happening on Roblox. In 2024, Cecilia, who you heard from earlier, investigated Roblox for Bloomberg News. She found that cops in the US had arrested at least two dozen people who abducted or abused kids they'd met on Roblox. Often they'd find a way to move the conversation off the platform, maybe to discord or snap with the goal of meeting up in person. Parents flipped. Since then, nearly 80 lawsuits have accused Roblox of enabling child exploitation. We spoke to Nebraska's attorney general earlier this year about his state's lawsuit. He said the company was not doing enough.

[Matt Kaufman]

Really fundamentally, what we'd like to see are enough protections to ensure that kids can operate on this site safely. This is unlike TikTok and others, in a way, because it's really marketed for kids.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

In response to that wave of lawsuits, Roblox rolled out a new round of parental controls. The big one, age verification, either through an ID or using facial recognition. Roblox calls this the safety gold standard. We wanted to put it to the test.

[Amazon Pharmacy Announcer]

Yep, I see it. Review my child's request to link their account on Roblox. Your child.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

That's our producer, Evan. For the sake of our experiment, he's the parent. Patrick, our other producer, is the child. That's his account they're linking. But you see, Patrick is not a child. He's trying to game the system and make a child account.

[Amazon Pharmacy Announcer]

Before we continue, we need to confirm your child's birthday.

[Patrick Fort]

Oh, it was November 18, 2014.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Patrick, the child wants to access chat features and maybe also some games with mature themes. To do that, he needs Evan the parent to sign off.

[Patrick Fort]

How cool of a dad are you, Evan?

[Amazon Pharmacy Announcer]

Well, there's three different levels of maturity that I can give you. I can give you minimal, which is occasional, mild violence, light, unrealistic blood, mild, which may contain repeated mild violence, heavy, unrealistic blood, mild crude humor and or repeated mild fear. And then there's moderate, which is repeated moderate violence, light realistic blood, moderate, crude humor, unplayable gambling content and or moderate fear. So, Patrick, you're 11. You know, I'm going to put you in the minimal. I think you're too young. You're almost 13. If you were 13, maybe I'd put you in the mild. But for now, we're just going to put you in the minimal category.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

At that point, a message pops up.

[Amazon Pharmacy Announcer]

Yes, as your child's safety matters, we need to check their age. We only allow people who completed an age check to turn on this feature. Get started from your child's account settings. Account info. Continue with camera.

[Patrick Fort]

Yeah, let's try that and see what happens.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Roblox then used the computer's webcam to estimate Patrick's age.

[Patrick Fort]

Estimating my age. The moment of truth. Okay, we estimated your age as 21 or older. We changed your age to 32,

[Mary Harris]

so

[Patrick Fort]

use chat and party features. Yeah, so we estimated your age as 21 or older, which, regrettably, is true. Actually, I don't regret that. I'm glad that I'm older than 21,

[Lizzie O'Leary]

so the bare minimum, literally not hiding his real age at all didn't work. We spent the next few days getting a little more creative. There was the fake ID made with generative AI.

[Patrick Fort]

This is what Gemini created when I asked for a work permit for a young adult with the birthday of November 18, 2014. My country of birth is Washington D.C. which, you know.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Sure, it's my country of birth.

[Evan Campbell]

It is.

[Patrick Fort]

You know what? Countryhood for Washington D.C. that's what I've always been saying.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

We're just gonna leapfrog statehood. That didn't work. There was also the AI de aging photo filter that made me look just a little bit younger. It was basically a bad facetune. I'm gonna take my headphones off. I'm gonna do a video. Which way do you need me to go first? That didn't work, so we went to the Internet for help. Specifically TikTok. Okay, there's no way this actually works, right? That's a finger with a face painted on it. This is the Roblox age verification.

[Bill.com Advertiser]

And they're trying to trick it with their finger.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Unsurprisingly, drawing a face on our thumbs did not work either. I, Lizzie, took a video of my face doing the various turns that the software recommends and then de aged it to make me look like a 10 year old. That did not pass the Roblox test. Neither did making a completely AI video of an imaginary 10 year old, though I did feel very creepy doing that. I gotta say, we did not crack the software. Now, to be clear, people online do say they can get around this stuff. A recent study out of the UK showed about a third of British kids are beating age verification software, in some cases by using a Sharpie to draw a mustache on their face. And it's gotta be said, we only spent about five hours on this. There are numerous examples of people cracking the system by just trying the same tricks over and over and over again. So is the system a success if it stops some, maybe even most bad actors? And are the privacy trade offs inherent to facial recognition worth it? We put those questions to Roblox's head of safety after the break.

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[Stella Dove]

We're lost. It feels like we're going round in circles. I'm gonna ask that man for directions. Hi there. We're trying to get to the state fairgrounds.

[T-Mobile Representative]

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[Lizzie O'Leary]

Nah, I'm just kidding.

[T-Mobile Representative]

Let me get my phone out.

[Stella Dove]

How is their signal out here?

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T Mobile and US Cellular are coming together so the network out here is huge. We get the same great signal as the city, saving a boatload with benefits. And there's a five year price guarantee too.

[Matt Kaufman]

Okay, here's the turn actually, can you

[Stella Dove]

pull up the way to a T Mobile store?

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[Lizzie O'Leary]

Just so I have it on tape, Matt, why don't you introduce yourself? Just like tell me who you are and what you do.

[Matt Kaufman]

Sure. My name is Matt Kaufman. I'm the Chief Safety Officer.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Matt Kaufman started at Roblox back in 2017, but he's been the chief safety officer there for three years. Those years have been monumental for the industry. In a bid to crack down on online games and social media, governments including the us, UK and Australia have rolled out a whole slew of age verification and child safety laws laws Kaufman and Roblox need to navigate.

[Matt Kaufman]

A lot of that does come back to like really starting to think through the eyes of what it was like for us to be kids and our own experience having kids and being teens. And I think that's where we, we always start. In November of last year we started saying that if you want to use communication on Roblox, you have to go through the age check process first and then More recently, we announced that we were going to be using the same process to start limiting what content users have access to. And we said we're going to use the same process, the same age data that we have to make sure that content which users are playing, games that they're playing, are appropriate for their age.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

And so that is automatic, or that is because of what parents decide, or both. Because I've gone on Roblox and tried to play as an 11 year old, we've also had producers go through and be sort of ones, the child, one's the parent. There seem like there are two ways that you're approaching this. One is just kind of hard blocks based on age verification and the other is parental controls.

[Matt Kaufman]

Yeah, I think in our minds, the first thing I would say is that we always respect parents decisions. Parents know their kids best, our caregivers know their kids best. And we know that there's, you know, varying perspectives on what types of content and features and whatnot that kids should have access to. We're also very respectful of parents who are not as engaged and they are not configuring the parental controls and they're not having discussions every day with their kids about what they're doing for whatever reason. We know parents and caregivers are really busy. There's other kids, people have jobs. And so it's always a balance between. You obviously want to give control to parents to make these decisions, but you also want to set defaults on the platform that makes sense for everyone, even if the parent isn't as involved.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

I interviewed the Nebraska attorney general, one of what half dozen states roughly that have sued the company. And one question that is raised in their suit, and that he and I talked about, was basically why it has taken up until this fall for these measures to go into place. I believe the line in the Nebraska suit is those changes are far too little and too late. How do you all respond to that?

[Matt Kaufman]

So I would start with an analogy which I do like. I wish when my kids were younger I had a fancy iPhone. I have my fancy iPhone here with an amazing camera because when I look back at the pictures of my kids, like I'm bummed they're not in 4K. They're not, you know, 60 frames per second. It's kind of grainy. Again, I'm aging myself. But the reality is you couldn't buy an iPhone 1710 years ago just didn't exist. And so when I look at the developments that we've had going from just first starting to test the Age check system last year to requiring it for communication, moving on to requiring it for content. Getting to a point where well over half of our daily active users, tens and tens of millions of users have gone through this process. We're moving pretty fast. And yes, I think, like everything in life, we wish, like, things could go faster and we wish technology would have evolved more quickly. But I just don't think it's responsible to make blanket statements like, you should have done all of this many, many years ago when the technology wasn't there. And I do think that we are moving quickly.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

We asked Matt about the thing Stella told us she saw on Roblox. The avatars of two people kissing. Now, you could walk out your door right now and see two people kissing. Not the worst thing ever, but I don't know, maybe you don't want your kid to see that, at least not without your supervision. When determining benchmarks for safety, where and how do you decide to draw the line? Especially in a time when content moderation on the Internet is being scaled back? Yeah, it's an interesting question because on the one hand you all are being asked to make decisions in some ways for parents who are not making decisions. Does that feel fair to you?

[Matt Kaufman]

I'm not sure I would use fair or unfair. I would categorize it like that. I think that it is a responsibility that we have that Roblox, I mean, just stepping back for a minute, Roblox is the only, you know, large platform of our size, gaming platform that is honest about the fact that you have kids and young teens signing up. And they sign up and they get access, literally.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Whereas a meta might just be lying.

[Matt Kaufman]

Well, there was a checkbox there said they were over 13. We're good to go. We're over 16 now in some parts of the world, like Roblox has been very clear from the very beginning, like, listen, we know that there are kids signing up and young teens. I don't just want to say kids because it's kids and young teens that are signing up. We're going to be honest about it. We're going to be honest about the fact that we have them on the platform. And because we have them on the platform, we are going to work hard to set the right defaults and implement parental controls.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Do you see any irony in the fact that, you know, so many other platforms, almost every social media platform, has essentially pulled back from content moderation and Roblox is here in this kind of state AG and congressional hot seat? It does seem like there's an interesting distance between those two things.

[Matt Kaufman]

I think from a Roblox perspective, we embrace the scrutiny. Because here's the thing. The more safe Roblox is and the more it's trusted by our users and our parents, the more Roblox will grow. Not sure where you are. I think you might be in New York, but if you took the subway to work or you took a train or you drove on a highway, or you were listening to the radio or something like that, or watching TV this morning, I'm pretty sure you didn't see a Roblox commercial. And you probably haven't. We Roblox has never had a Super bowl commercial, for example. Our growth isn't driven by that. Our growth is driven by the trust of our users. The one piece of irony that I will share with you is that oftentimes things show up in social media like, how, how could this have happened? Look what I recorded and showed on, on social media. Nobody ever asked the question of how, like, is it okay to show that stuff on social media? Because clearly kids and teens are on social media, like, they're there watching it. And I do think that there's some irony that, like the press and policymakers, it never dawns on them that, like, there's, you know, this irony taking place.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Matt has a point here. According to Bloomberg's Cecilia Donostasio, the worst stuff doesn't usually happen on Roblox. It happens when the interactions are moved to other platforms.

[Cecilia Donostasio]

One of the things that's fascinating with Roblox is that it has fewer reports to the national center for Missing and Exploited Children than some of its other platforms. For example, you'll see Instagram has a ton of reports of, you know, child sex abuse material, or Snap does, or TikTok does, but Roblox, not so much. And when we were investigating the platform, one of the things that experts told us is that Roblox sits upstream of some of these other platforms where maybe a predator could meet a child on Roblox. Roblox. But actually no identifiable child sex abuse material will appear on Roblox, which is why some of this stuff will not be identified until it lands on, like, Discord, Snap, or elsewhere. That's created a lot of issues for law enforcement and for attorneys when it comes to actually answering the question, what is Roblox's culpability?

[Lizzie O'Leary]

We mentioned earlier the many, many lawsuits against Roblox. We should also note Roblox has settled several of them for more than $30 million. So what is Roblox's culpability? Are they a bad actor ignoring child predators so they can make a buck? Or are they a scapegoat facing pushback for a problem they didn't create and can't actually solve? Our producer Patrick, put those questions to Munmun Dushoudri, a researcher at Georgia Tech University.

[Munmun Dushoudri]

We need to have some standards on effectiveness. Can we all agree that this is the minimum level of efficacy or effectiveness? Anything. Any safety solution such as age verification should have sort of like an industry standard of those things. And that's a really interesting point, but I don't think anything like that exists. In fact, most platforms, there are many platforms with children or minors as users who implement age verification, but it is rarely ever disclosed how good that algorithm is or what is that effectiveness. We have deferred these decisions of safety to the companies, to these platforms.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

She says that no matter what you do, it's inevitable that some people will be able to get around security systems. But that doesn't mean you should do nothing.

[Munmun Dushoudri]

A good space to draw some inspiration from is actually something that we take for granted today. That's spam filtering. Again, looking at history, like the late 90s, spam was one of the biggest challenges of the day. You know, I was still in middle school or something, and I remember I had my email account and everybody said, be careful, there's a lot of spam out there. But again, nobody talks about spam anymore. It's like a solved problem. Not because the bad people have gone away and spam doesn't. You know, there's no spam anymore in the world. In fact, if anything, there's more spam. But what worked is staying ahead of the game. It's always spam is also a catching up to it. If you didn't do anything, the spammers have the upper hand. They do something and harm happens. Then you are like, oh, okay, harm has happened. We need to do something about it. That's not how that field evolved. It evolved by staying ahead of the bad people. And I think we kind of need something like that in the social media and mental health space where it's not enough to be reactive to these harms, but we have to kind of. We, as in, you know, as a community, as a society, we need to be thinking prospectively about as newer platforms come, how are they similar or different? What are the features that we have seen? What are the commonalities? Are there things that have been tried before that have worked or not worked? What are sort of the new things? How do we get ahead of the curve, and that's what we would need.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Moonwin says you need to be proactive to keep kids safe online. But does keeping kids safe require knowing exactly who is a kid in the first place? As millions of kids and adults begin uploading their photos to Roblox, a lot of users are wondering where those pictures go. Here's Cecilia again.

[Cecilia Donostasio]

The end of anonymity on the Internet is a very hazy thing. And I think people bring it up every couple of years with different developments in platform safety and surveillance. Lately, when it comes to age verification, what people who run these platforms would say is, hey, we actually already had a lot of metadata on you, and if a government agency or law enforcement sent us a subpoena, we would be able to maybe even identify who you are and where you live, no matter what. So you do see people in the trust and safety world saying, you know, age verification on one hand is not so meaningful, a step away from what we've already been doing. But one of the things that you see privacy advocates saying too is, you know, a lot of these companies are relying on these third party vendors to do age verification. And there have been some significant data breaches with those vendors that have inspired a lot of concerns that if you upload your ID to a platform, it won't show up somewhere on some sort of like third party, like hacking website and get sold and start all these kinds of issues for you.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

There's also the concern that if, say, your gender identity does not match the identity that is on your id, that that could be used against you.

[Cecilia Donostasio]

Yeah, that's a very legitimate concern. And there are people in the sex work industry as well who have concerns about age verification and their anonymity being compromised. You know, vulnerable people always have more at stake when it comes to sharing information about themselves with tech platforms, period.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

We put this question to Matt Roblox's chief safety officer.

[Matt Kaufman]

The analogy that I've used around this is, and this is going to age me is when they first started mandating seatbelts in cars. And I remember as a kid, like, you would have to wear your seatbelts, and before that nobody ever had to wear them. And the biggest argument against seatbelts was that if you got into a car accident, you wouldn't be able to get out of the car. Like the seatbelt could jam and something bad could happen. And the people who raised those concerns were 100% right. But I think when you ask people today, and you know, you go, you get in the car, you put Your kids in the car, everybody puts their seatbelt on and because seatbelts are much better than not having them. And I think the age check process is very similar. It is not perfect. Like we are not making the argument that it is perfect, but if you compare getting real, like actual more information about the person who's on the other side of the screen and how old they are, it's better than just asking somebody to type in a number. I wish it was different. I wish everyone we asked how old they are, they were super honest and they told us exactly how old they were. But it's just not the world we live in. And so that's why age checks are really important. Like I said, they're not perfect. We don't mandate them. You don't have to do it. But if you're not going to do the age check, then you're going to have a more limited experience.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

On Roblox, that experience is about to get even more limited. Next month, Roblox is taking things a step further with kid accounts. One for users 5 to 8, another for users 9 to 15. The new age based system will automatically assign users to one of the new accounts. For her part, Stella, Mary's daughter, she's not letting Roblox have her face.

[Stella Dove]

Like the entire point of Roblox is having these avatars and not knowing who the person is. Which again can be weird. But it's like the entire point is so that you can literally be whatever.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

But she's not getting off of it either.

[Stella Dove]

It's like there's so many weird places out there and it's become such a weird thing, you know, it's like weirdos are everywhere.

[Mary Harris]

How long do you think you'll use Roblox?

[Stella Dove]

I'll use Roblox until I can find other ways to. Until I can use like Minecraft, you know what I'm saying?

[Mary Harris]

Or social media or something.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Yes.

[Stella Dove]

Cause it's like a way of connection to people like you don't want to, I don't want to completely give up because these people are. The people running Roblox are just doing a terrible job at making it better. And I have so many ideas on how they can fix it. And it's just what I'm saying. Call you.

[Cecilia Donostasio]

Call. Call Stella.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Call Stella. Roblox. Call Stella.

[Stella Dove]

Yes, call. Don't call me. Actually,

[Lizzie O'Leary]

That is it for our show today. Special thanks to Mary Harris and Stella as well as Cecilia Donostasio. What next? TBD is produced by Evan Campbell and Patrick Fort. Our show is edited by Paige Osborne, who is the senior supervising producer for what Next and what Next tbd. Mia Lobel is the executive producer of audio at Slate, and TBD is part of the larger what Next family. We will be back next week with more episodes. I'm Lizzie o'. Leary. Thanks for listening.

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