My Wife Uninstalled Roblox. Then I Talked to Their Safety Team.

I have two daughters. My older one was on Roblox until my wife uninstalled it. Not because something happened, but because she couldn't prove herself that nothing would, and I really didn't have a good counter argument. So, I'm hoping that by end of this conversation, I will. We have two alpha people from Roblox. We got Matt Kauffman, Chief Safety Officer, and Eliza Jacobs, Vice President of Safety Products. Welcome to the podcast.
Thank you for having us.
So, Matt, can you give me some counter arguments? Like, where should I start?
I think one place to start is every day tens of millions, millions and millions, the vast majority of all the users on Roblox have safe, positive experiences. They're spending time with their friends, they're spending time with their family, they're playing games, and and they're creating stuff, too. And I can say like from from the team that Eliza and I are on, um within our team and across all of Roblox, safety is our number one

priority. And I think that that's something that is often lost on people. They think that, you know, Roblox is, you know, some giant megacorp, and we're trying to make growth decisions over safety and other things like that. And the the thing I remind people of is that the trust that our users have in Roblox and their parents have in Roblox, that's what's really enabled Roblox to grow. It's safety is our number one priority. And we devote an enormous amount of resources to keeping the platform safe. We understand that um there are isolated incidents that make the news, and we investigate those. I'm sure we'll talk about more of that later. And we are constantly making the platform better and safer. We go above and beyond what literally every other like platform that kids and teens are spending time on, we don't allow people to share images and video when they're talking to each

other. We monitor all tr- all communication. There's no encryption. We watch it all. And we proactively, if we see something that's wrong, we will do something about it. Roblox is not a, you know, we're not a free speech platform. We're a platform for people to come together and play games with each other. And because of that, we can apply really stringent policies and restrictions on what happens on the platform. I want to end by just saying like, we're not perfect. Um, you know, I don't think you can go outside and and cross the street just because there's a crosswalk there and there's lights that flash and all of that stuff. Are you 100% guaranteed that nothing could ever possibly happen in that crosswalk? No. And Roblox is like the real world, and we're not perfect. Um, but I, speaking on behalf of myself and of my team and and the work that Eliza does, it is our number one priority to make it as safe as it possibly can be.

Eliza, I want to read something that that CEO David Baszucki said. He said that parents are the ultimate arbiters of responsibility on Roblox. And I want to naturally take that very seriously. And if that's the position, why does a child account default to anything at maximum restriction?
Yeah. Yeah. Look, as a parent myself, I completely understand your wife's concerns. We're all navigating this internet space that we did not grow up with, um, and trying to make choices for our kids that are right. You know, I'm constantly meddling with my daughter's parental controls on various things as well. Um, so so a couple of things. So, first of all, the depending on the age of the child, right? The our youngest users, um, are defaulted into the most restrictive settings. So, for example, users under the age of nine by default have no access to chat on the platform. And it can only be turned on if a parent goes in, um, links their account to their kids' account, and turns it on with parental controls. Um they're also defaulted into the most restrictive content settings. So, the games that they can play based on the rating of

those games. Um and we're constantly layering in more systems uh in place. And so, we just announced, and it will be launching globally in June, Roblox kids accounts and Roblox select accounts. So, kids accounts are for users 5 to 8, and select accounts are for users 9 to 15. Uh and we're really taking sort of a training wheels approach to this system where we want to sort of slowly give kids more access to features, more access um to communication on the platform and games as they grow up as we think it's age and developmentally appropriate. So, that is our approach. Uh and we want it to be safe out of the box, right? There's a lot going on for parents. There's a lot Kids are on a lot of platforms. Um it can be really overwhelming to have to go in and fine-tune everything. So, we want the defaults to be what we think is developmentally appropriate for most kids. And then parents can go in and make changes um like I have a daughter who really is not good with anything scary at all. Even things that are like rated G but a little bit scary, not for

her. Um and so, I know as a parent that like I'm not going to let her see those movies, right? Cuz it's not good for her um even if it's otherwise age appropriate. Um so, parents can make those kinds of choices. They can set screen time limits. They can set spending limits. They can block individual games. They can approve individual games. Um so, all those things sort of in terms of personalizing the experience for your kid, we want to give parents the ability to do. Um but the the default settings we want to be age appropriate without without much more effort. Um and all of this will be underpinned by our facial age estimation technology. So, before, you know, we just had self-declared age, right? We had to trust that your daughters were going to sign up and tell the truth about how old they were. Um and you know, sometimes that was true and sometimes it wasn't. Um generally actually kids are pretty honest. Uh, but but now we actually have this technology that allows us to estimate how old kids really are. This is an age group, right, that doesn't have a driver's license, they don't probably don't have a passport. Um, and so without an ID, we

can now know how old kids are, put them in the right bucket for their age.
And how's this maximum restriction when did that go live? Because I I remember I think it was like a maybe 6 months ago when I was going through the restriction settings and and putting them to the highest. Is this a recent change or it has been there for a while?
Yeah, so kids and select accounts are launching in June. Um, the the no chat for your 9s has been on for a while. Um, you know, we're always updating systems and launching new products and changing things. Um, and then we launched facial age estimation globally on a platform in January to control communication. So that's relatively new. Um, but up until then when you went into the game chat you could talk to anybody, you know, it was all filtered. As Matt said, there was no sharing of images or videos. Um, but you could talk to whoever was in that server. Now you have to complete facial age estimation to get access to communication features. And then once you do that, you can only chat with other players that are around your same

age, like in your peer group. Um, and so that's new globally in January.
What's been the feedback from parents and kids as you've rolled on these these new safety features?
I think we've seen really positive feedback from parents and from policy makers. And I think you let's talk about face to age facial age estimation. We call it age check. Um, we're the largest platform in the world to do this as an age gate proactively before people get access to content. I think you'll hear from a lot of other platforms that they run some estimation systems in the back and if they see something that looks anomalous and you may not be the age that you claimed you were then they might do something. Roblox took a different tactic and we just said, "If you're going to use this feature, communication, you have to go through the process, period." And I think from a from a parent perspective and from policy makers, I think that they were um very happy with what we had done. And I think on the policy side, I think one thing that we

were able to do is to show that you can actually do that at scale. Um way more than half of our users on the platform every day have already gone through this process. I think for users, to be honest, it's a change. And Roblox has been around for a long time and we have a lot of people who've been on the platform and grown up on the platform. Like even if you look at our top developers, and I I know you know a number of them, they grew up playing on Roblox. And so people with a long history on the platform, it does feel like things are changing. And so we recognize that for our player community, this can feel different. I was like, "Well, I didn't have to go through age estimation before, why do I have to go through it now?" Um and so we have to explain that and um the community is migrating, but I it wouldn't be honest to say that it's been hiccup-free with our community.
Yeah, and you have a large community.
Yeah.
And a and a vocal community, and a passionate community, which we love. And

I think we're always like listening to the community and responding. So one thing that happened when we launched age check was we realized, "Well, now kids can't play with their parents. Like they can't talk to their parents." So if you want to play a game with your kids, now you're you're locked out of that because your age and you know, you're in different age buckets. So we're building systems to remedy that problem. Um so we're always going to keep innovating and updating and making it um make sense for our community, but with safety as the foundation.
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How does the age check technology work in practice? Meaning like how foolproof is it? Like can I log in as a 9-year-old? I know I look young, but you know.
Well, I can say the age So, let's talk about the the actual process what's happening. Um the first is, you know, it asks you to turn on your camera. And the first thing it's doing is taking a quick video of you. And the second thing it's doing is it's going to take a picture and it's going to estimate your age from the picture. And so like why are those two different steps? The first step with that short video is to find out if you're a real person. You know, it asks you to move your head around and all of that stuff. And like one of the things that it's looking for is do you have ears? Like the the actual full ear. Because if you're just looking at somebody's picture, you can't see it. But if you ask somebody to move their head around, you'll be like, "Okay, this is a real person, not just somebody who's holding up, you know, some a photo or a image of

somebody." The second step is looking at your face and saying, "Okay, based on the structure of your face, how old are you?" Um for users who are under 18 years old, um what we typically see, actually I think it's more like under 25, we see that the age error is about plus or minus 1.4 years. So, is it perfect? Can it tell you when your birthday is? No. But it can tell you approximately how old you are within a pretty reasonable error boundary. And what I ask people to consider is, you know, people who have like nieces or nephews or younger brothers and sisters, if you walk into a classroom, like an elementary school, you know, let's say you walk into a fourth grade classroom or fifth grade classroom and you look around, there going to be people who look a year under, a year over, but nobody in the classroom's going to look, except for the teacher, is going to look like, you know, they're 25 or 30. It just is not how things work. Um the technology, however, isn't perfect. Um so we have a number of

measures that you can go in and you can correct things if you get it wrong. One of the things that we learned when we launched this was that a lot of kids are so accustomed to getting asked to like verify something or do something on their phone that they simply hand it to their parent. And the parents are so accustomed to just like, "Oh, I need to do something. I'm really busy. The kid is asking for something. Just click click is just let me get this thing done." And so we found that a lot of parents were doing the age check for their kids. And you could actually, like when we went in and we did the QA, you could see the kids sitting in the background. They're like, "Mom and Dad, like get this thing done." And so we had to implement a number of things to be able to correct for that. Um and we did that. Hopefully it's uh it's gotten a lot better now. Um and the process is really smooth. I also want to end with we respect the fact that not everybody wants to do the process. We understand. Like we are not requiring you to do this. But what we are saying

is if you want to access something like communication, where it's really important that we know, like are you the right age to start communicating on Roblox, it's required. And we actually do two things on the communication side. One, we gate things, like if you're not old enough to communicate, then you can't. And the other thing we do is when you're playing games and people are communicating and they're planning and, you know, they're doing strategy and coordinating game play and all of that stuff, we make sure people are limited to only talking to people of similar ages. And one of the things that that does is it increases stability on the platform. So, if you again going back to some of these analogies, like if you go to a you know playground, you know, lunch at you know, school and you hear kids talking and the way they talk and communicate and what they're saying, that might be totally appropriate if, you know, they're in middle school. But, if they weren't in middle school, you might think, "Wow, you know, maybe that's not the right language or the right tone people should have."

And so, by clustering people with similar ages, we've seen an increase in stability on the platform.
And do you have to re- recheck your age? Like is there a re-verification process in a certain time period?
Yeah, we we're constantly looking at like the user behavior and what's going on. And if we see something that looks anomalous, like we see, you know, uh you know, the the age check was one thing, but we see that the user is really doing something that's more typical of like an old much older user or a much younger user, we'll ask them to redo the process.
Yeah, and we we have to have that continuous age like estimation on the back end, right? Because um just as a fraud protection measure. So, that if you uh you know, if I give my phone to my older brother or something and um to get him to verify, then um but then I'm actually playing on it. We want to make sure that like the person that's playing on that account is the person whose age we have on that account. Um the other thing I would say

is that in general, right? Kids on Roblox want to talk to their friends. So, they're incentivized to have the right age because they want to be in the same bucket as their friends and play together. Um so, so in general that um that error is is is less likely. Um it's not, you know, they're not trying to get a fake ID to get into a club. Like that there there's not they're not incentivized in that way um because they want to talk to their friends on the platform.
I want to add one more thing, which is I think another thing that we've learned through this process is that what you we're not the only ones who do age checks. Um other platforms do age checks as well. And I think everybody has seen the videos online of somebody like putting like two dots and a smiley face on their finger and holding it up to the camera and being like, "Hey, look, I age checked. It says I'm 25." Um that's it that's doesn't happen, but it makes really good social media. The other thing is, you know, we talked about the fraud checks that happen at the beginning to make sure you're a real

person and you're not holding up your phone with somebody else's image and stuff. Um that's something that we elect to be very aggressive with at Roblox. And we run all kinds of fraud checking and other things like that. Um we can't say the same thing of everybody in the industry. These are dials that people have. So, other platforms for different reasons may or may not run all of those checks. We know that that we do. And the last thing is and again like when the people get buy things in in in social media, they post it and they're like, "Oh, these age checks things just don't work." Um most of the time that's because of these fraud detections that just aren't run. And the last thing that we've seen a lot is, you know, a lot of people reach out to me and say, "Hey, you know, my child age checked and it said they were 35." And we say, "Well, okay, like whose whose face did you check?" And the parents are like, "Oh, I did it."

And they're like, "Okay, well, like that's why it's not the right number." But when people talk about this in social media and you know, it just it doesn't make headlines for the you know, the 12-year-old to be like, "Hey, my mom and dad did it for me and it you know, that's why it says I'm 35. Like they say, "Hey, look, I'm 35. Look what happened." And so again, the technology is not perfect, but I think in this, you know, social media where people like to talk about the exploits around age checks, it can be pretty confusing out there. Um but we still think that it is the right thing to do and it is the most accessible thing to do for the broadest population that's out there.
And to understand the scale, how many people have done the uh the age check? Just in terms of millions or tens of millions.
I think we give out a specific number, but it is many, many tens of millions. I I think it's safe to say we're I I don't know if we're the largest platform in the world that has done this

at the scale that we've done it at. Um but if we're not the largest, we must be very close to it and I don't know off the top of my head who would have done more.
Well, let me steel man your position because you spend more on safety than probably any other platform. Uh you've built age verification, you got chat filtering, you have real-time moderation, you work with law enforcements and and policy makers. The investments you've made have been costly, not just in terms of time or money, but also in terms of growth, as we've seen. Uh why does public still not believe you?
So I think I I would start with um the fact that first of all, you know, millions of users. The vast, vast majority of our users have safe, fun, entertaining experiences playing games, making games with their friends. Um and so I just always want to start there. But then I want to say like Roblox is really unique. Um Roblox is the only large platform in the world,

when you think about, you know, large online platform in the world, um that is super transparent about the fact that there are kids and teens on the platform. We're not saying that there was a checkbox that somebody hit when they signed up and therefore since they hit that checkbox everybody therefore must be over 13 or 16 or 18 or whatever it is. We say, "Hey, listen, these are the ages of our users and we don't block them when they sign up. They we take the age that they tell us and and that's what we're going to use and now we're using the age check to get even more accuracy on those ages. And we've always been very transparent about that. And our philosophy from the beginning has been like, "If you know that there are kids on the platform, be honest about it, find out how old they are, and then let's deliver a safe and positive experience for everybody regardless of their age." And I think that that perspective and the transparency about the kids on the platform and teens on the platform

opens Roblox up to a lot of scrutiny. I think parents and policy makers they they really want the best for their kids and I think we share that. We want the best for the kids on the platform. We want the best for everybody's kids. I think as Eliza said, you know, one thing that that um I really appreciate about all of us working at safety here is that all of us always start with like, "What was What would be the right thing to do if we were making the rules for our kids on Roblox?" That's the first question. The second question is, "Should we make decisions on behalf of other people?" Because just because we think it's the right decision of what we might do as a parent, that doesn't mean that a parent, you know, down the street or down the hall or on the other side of the world is going to make the same decision. So, we always ask ourselves these questions. Now, the scrutiny that we get from policy makers, one way we look at it is we embrace it. Like all of that scrutiny is making

us you think harder. It offers us more information about what's going on on the platform. It gives us more insights and it lets us make Roblox better. And the key thing, which I mentioned earlier, is that the safety of Roblox and the trust that our users have, parents included, is the primary growth driver of Roblox. You know, one of the things I tell people is like, you know, before an interview, like, you know, when you're waking up in the morning, maybe you're watching TV or you're reading the newspaper newspaper online or whatever it is, you probably didn't see giant ads for Roblox. And it's not It's because Roblox hasn't grown that way. And I think that makes us very different than a lot of other say in the gaming space. Like, our growth is not predicated on advertising. Our growth is predicated on um on trust of our users. Um so, and we see all of that coming together making the platform better, making it safer, earning trust, is a real competitive differentiator. It's a differentiator because parents

trust us. It's also a differentiator, which people don't always talk about, because our developers can come to Roblox and they can say, "Hey, I can build something on Roblox and Roblox can help me make it safe, and they can help me make it civil." And just want to Just like a creator says, "I can create a game for like 10 users, but Roblox is going to make it, you know, scale to 10 million, and they can take care of that, and I don't have to worry about it." We want creators to think the same way about safety. Is they can create an experience, Roblox will handle all of this policy, safety, all of that stuff in the background, and they can focus on their own craft.
On the regulatory side, I would also say that, you know, as Matt said, we welcome that partnership. We're talking to regulators and policy makers and parent We have a parent council, we have a teen council. We want to get all of that feedback. But, what we also want is for there to be sort of an industry standard around some of this stuff, because we can only keep people safe on Roblox. We only have control of our platform. But, you know, everyone in gaming knows like your you're maybe you're talking on a

different platform or you're playing on this platform and you're creating you know that people are not only on one platform and so what we often see with these stories that come out is when we actually look into it on our side the bad content bad behavior didn't happen on our platform because we have filters because you can't share images because we don't encrypt all of those things and it's really like a network problem and so we want regulations that make sense for kids across the whole internet not just for us and you know we launched age check there's no regulation requiring us to do that we just knew it's the right thing to do but we hope that it's a beacon for the rest of the industry to say like look this is where we're going the technology is available the check box that says you're 13 year older is not going to cut it anymore we need to do more now that we have the capacity
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in the beginning I said my wife uninstalled Roblox and I was the one who installed it originally because I mean I play those games and I played it with my with my daughter and she uninstalled it based on the Instagram reels and different podcasts that she saw and heard and so I'm I'm curious how do you communicate to people who don't communicate to you but get a second hand information about your platform that they have never even experienced and immediately just rush to delete your app without even

like even putting it on LLM and asking the question.
Yeah. I mean, look things like this, right? Like talking in new avenues, talking on social media, going to where people are getting their news and engaging. You know, it's not news is what's what's interesting, what's flashy. Like if it if it's a like Matt was saying about the age check stories, right? Like it's it's not interesting to tell the story of like kid got on Roblox, had a really awesome time, played with their friends, learned some STEM skills, and then like went to bed. Like that's not it's not a it's not an Instagram reel that's sort of catchy, I think. So I but I think we need to communicate in places where people are getting their information and answer questions about how these safety systems work, encourage parents to engage with their kids, set up those parental controls. Mostly not because necessarily they need to set them up to make changes to the settings, but more because it gives you visibility into

what your kids are doing on the platform. Shows you who they're talking to and what they're playing, which means that you can have a conversation with them. You know, although sometimes the language is beyond me. Brain rots and everything else. But at least if you have that visibility, you can say, "Oh, I see you were playing dress to impress. Like tell me about that." And actually I was just talking to a lawmaker yesterday whose daughter is very into dress to impress and she was asking me all kinds of questions about it. And so yeah, I just think we need to get our story out there in the places where people are and not necessarily [laughter] make them come to Roblox to to find that information.
One thing I wanted to add to what Eliza was saying is that we do know that there's a lot of stuff out there, the Instagram reels and you know, TikTok videos and YouTube videos and stuff like that. And it is one of the things that I think that that we've really um learned or come to appreciate over the last couple years is

is that dynamic. And there's a couple things that come from that. The first is that Roblox has always invested heavily in safety. And we've invested heavily in, you know, keeping communication safe and, you know, other things like that. I do think that one of the things that we've realized over the last couple years is that our focus on the critical harms, um the the things where, you know, people's um are are really in in some kind of real safety risk took precedence, as it should, over looking at low severity, sort of long tail violative content. It's like, you know, somebody creates a a username and the username is Jeff Epstein. Or somebody creates a a username or a maybe a game that says, you know, uh Diddy's playground. Even if there's maybe there's nothing behind that. It's just the name of a game. And they made it cool picture, but if you enter it, you look around, we call these base

plate games, there's nothing there. What we found was when we were talking about safety, we would talk about all of these sophisticated systems we have in place to like keep kids safe and like how we handle communication and teen safety and all of these things. And people would look at us and they they but yeah, but I just found a user that was Diddy 123725. Why? And I see it on Instagram. So, like, how can you tell me that, you know, you're taking care of these like really critical harms when Jeff somebody just created that username. And you know, they were right. Like, and even though we would have might argue that it's a false equivalence, very two different types of harm, it was still on the platform. So, one of the things we've really focused on recently is like how to really start taking care of all that long-tail content. And and really cleaning that up. And that was really a part of this impetus to launch Roblox Kids and Roblox Select.

So, just remind everybody, Roblox Kids is starting in June. When you create an account, if you're under nine, you'll get Roblox Kids. If you're between nine and 15, you'll get Roblox Select. In both of those cases, we limit the content that's available to our most popular, highest quality content. And what this is doing is it's setting up a system where we can balance the magic of a UGC platform where anybody can come and create, and we have millions and millions of games with how do we make sure that our youngest users have access to those games that are have the highest quality. And so, those games that are in Roblox Kids and Roblox Select, they have to go through a few things. First, the developer has to give us their ID, so we know who the developer is. Um we have an extended evaluation period for all of that content, so we can kind of see what it's like as older users are playing it. Um and then we also apply um our uh maturity rating systems to it to

make sure it's age-appropriate for the age. And so, I think, you know, if you going back to like what you see on TikTok and, you know, Reels and all of that stuff, we are trying to make a concerted effort to make sure that our youngest users are really playing that highest quality content. And the last thing I'll leave you with, which goes back to your previous question, which is, you know, the scrutiny that Roblox is under, it is always an irony that these platforms, TikTok, YouTube, or whatever, that have videos about things that slipped by our moderation on Roblox, nobody ever questions why they're on those platforms, and many kids and teens have access to those platforms. Yet, when it's on Roblox, I think that there people hold a different standard for Roblox. And that's okay, it's making us better. Um but it is sort of an interesting observation of of how the industry works.
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Yeah, I I I went to So, before my my wife's action, I wasn't really paying the attention, to be honest, to to any of these topics. I kind of assumed that this is platform for kids, but I I was investigating this a little bit and I I found this show called Predator Hunters on YouTube, which is not something I would ever search for, but it was part of this investigation. And what caught me was that that they were catching essentially

predators by entrapping them through through this uh through Roblox. And while the audience were saying, you know, thank God that somebody's doing something to catch these people, what ended up happening is Roblox sued those hunters. And my question is what does that tell about the other sort of a gap between your internal metrics and the public perception?
I I don't know if we sued them, but we did we did remove them from the platform. Um and I'll tell you why and I can understand the sort of like, but they're the you know, the good guy the Roblox
Right? Yeah, they're hunting, they're trying to find bad people and get them off the platform that Roblox didn't find and and shouldn't you guys be on the same side? Um, so I completely understand that sort of from the outside, but a couple of things. First of all, I think it's very publicly known now that those folks were actually finding the bad actors off the platform and then bringing them onto the platform, saying come to Roblox so that

I can get these screenshots, so that I can uh and then exiting again because again we have these chat filters and you can't share images or videos. Um, and really all in service of clicks, right? Like that it was a it was a business that was being run. Um, and in the meantime, they were breaking our rules on the platform, bringing bad actors to the platform, engaging in violative behavior, normalizing that violative behavior on the platform. All of these things are just things we have no tolerance for. You cannot come to the platform and have a sexual conversation and expect to stay on the platform. That's not We don't allow that and we don't allow it for anyone. Um, and you know, we work very closely with law enforcement. We have a team of investigators that many of whom come from law enforcement that are looking into these kinds of cases. We built an ML model that searches for grooming conversations, um, which we actually also open source to the industry because

we want everybody to be safe. We don't want to gatekeep on safety. Um, so we open source that model to everybody. We're proactively looking for this stuff all of the time. Um, and so people interfering with those systems and violating our policies makes our platform less safe. Uh, and so I I understand the instinct of sort of well, they were the good guys, why are you banning the good guys? But actually they were doing harm to people on the platform, uh, and that not okay. We can't allow that.
That's interesting context because I didn't know that. Because they were again narrating the story without the context that you gave me now. They were telling essentially painting a picture how evil Roblox is because it sues the people that are trying to do the right things. And that kind of leads to my previous point is somebody like the audience is telling the story without Roblox interfering with the story. And then you come up with you know, the tools where you moderate 150 million daily users with AI. The public doesn't hear that.

They see the reels and they see the podcasts and and it's narrated by by people who don't engage with you.
Yeah. By bad actors, you know, we don't want those folks telling our story. Um and and look, I think also our as we said our community's incredibly passionate. Um they care deeply about the safety of the platform. I actually run the community safety council which is made up of developers who give us feedback and who we share our safety tools with so that they can tell us what they think about them and what would work in their games. These are super passionate community members who want the platform to be safe and we do too. Um and but but you know, you can't you can't make the platform less safe in an effort to make it more safe. Like that doesn't make sense. Um and so we're not going to allow folks to sort of violate our rules on the platform um to to go viral in that way.
And the one thing just to really underscore is

there are a lot of people out there who point out issues on Roblox and they contact us and they say, "Hey, here's a problem." Um whether it's a parent or a player on the platform or a policy maker, whoever. Um they're really helping us make the platform better. And like all of that input we get is incredibly appreciated. There is also people who have turned It a business around "Hey, look what I found. I haven't reported it to Roblox yet, but look what I found and here it is." And some of the stuff that we see um is, you know, we'll see a game which is violative, a game that violates our policy. And we'll see these situations where the game turns on, it has maybe 20 or 30 users, we find it, we turn it off, all within the span of maybe 30 minutes. But then it ends up on YouTube and

TikTok and Instagram. There's something going on out there of people who are like clearly understand that this is the way that they can drive clicks and it's a business. And it puts us in a in a tricky position because when you have people who create a business around fostering bad content or bad situations on Roblox, it appears that, you know, they're just trying to help, but they actually become the instigators of this type of stuff. And I think it's hard in social media and like a 15-second clip to like have, you know, a a sort of a rational intellectual uh debate about that stuff. So, we look at like, well, what can we do? And we can just make the platform better every day. We can make the platform better so that even if something shows up for like, you know, is uploaded to platform, whether 30 people saw it or one person saw it or a million people saw it, it doesn't matter. It was there and we have

to have sort of a zero-tolerance approach to this stuff and build systems of
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Yeah, and talking about the scale, as you said in in the other public documents, it was 150 million daily users that you moderate with AI. Do you have a a notion of what the failure rate is on on the moderation?
I think the first thing to think about with moderation is that it's a lot like driving a car. So, when you get into your car, what do you think about what keeps you safe in

the car? It's like, well, you know, you have a bumper, and you have an airbag, and you have a seatbelt, and you have now things that like drive you like turn the car if it thinks you're going to hit something or automatically hit the brakes. Every single one of those is part of a larger system. And every single one of those is imperfect. Like a the bumper will not save your life by itself, nor will the airbag. But when they all act together, it's pretty good. And so, when we think about safety systems on Roblox, and we think about the various AI systems and other things like that that we we have, we we can very honest and transparent that none of them are perfect, but you put them all together, and they create a safety net. So, we have multiple layers. Like we start with policies, which Aliza and her team are all responsible for defining all of our policies of what's okay and not okay. And it goes back to those things like we don't allow you to, you know, share images when you chat on Roblox. It's just you don't need to do that to play a game, um so let's just we're not going to support it.

Um and then within the product, obviously, we have the AI systems that are running all the time, but we also have ways for users to report things. You know, users say like, "Hey, I saw something. I want to report it." And then we have automated systems that like look at all of those user reports, and they can capture evidence that's being collected on the platform all the time and make decisions. And we don't always get those decisions right. Like AI, like I think what you know people have now become very accustomed to looking at the magic of an LLM, and it's like, "Oh my god, like look, like you know, it planned my summer vacation for me, or it told me exactly like what this plant was that I was really curious about." But if those things, if their accuracy rates are 80% 90%, that's amazing if you're one-on-one. But if you got like 150 million users a day, and you're like, "Well, we might ban, you know, 10 20% of you by accident." Like it doesn't work. And so you have to

have really robust appeal systems where you have people behind the scenes looking at stuff and saying like, "Hey, you know, maybe we made a mistake, and we need to correct that." So it's all about a system. Uh to your original question, we don't publish specific metrics because it's hard to take back to the car analogy, if I gave you a metric about the bumper, it wouldn't really tell you about the entire the entirety of the safety of the vehicle.
It's it's also a such an incredibly dynamic platform, right? Like a platform like Instagram or TikTok or or YouTube that has finite videos, like you can watch that little video and decide whether it violates the policies. But we've got however many servers of every game going with different people on every server at every second. Um and people are moving and changing and interacting and the chat is changing. Nothing is finite. So we have to have different checkpoints. So we, you know, moderate every asset as it's uploaded to the platform. But then those assets get combined into games. Well, now we have to look at it again in the combination. And then we moderate the accuracy of the

rating, right? So the rating governs everything that's in the game, but has nothing to do with what the players do in the game. It's just the developer doesn't control that. So we moderate the accuracy of the rating, and then we see how people are actually playing the game. So, part of the kids and select lunch is that we are going to wait until there is sufficient engagement from the 16 plus audience in the game itself, um to see how they're actually playing it and engaging with it. And maybe there's a level that they unlock that we didn't see before some sort of element. Um and we want to see that engagement, so we really understand how the game is being played and interacted with before we send it in to the kids and select accounts, which is a I just a more cabineted experience. Um we also I think we published recently a blog post about what we call RM3, which is real-time multimodal moderation. And that's a system that we use to actually moderate the user behavior, the interaction. So, we're going in and looking at um sort of snapshots of servers to understand how folks are engaging, and then um

enforcing, you know, our policies on that user behavior as well. So, as Matt said, many layers, and they have to keep innovating in the technology to sort of catch all the different layers. Um but it's it's a really challenging and very interesting safety problem um because of all those different layers and the dynamism of the platform.
You have a I mean, clearly a very robust detection to action loop. What I What I'm curious is that that as you said, Roblox is a social graph, like biggest social graph with kids in the world, probably the one ever been. And something you said also before is that uh bad actors or predators use it to move people or kids for from Roblox to Discord and Snapchat, as you mentioned. How do you trigger a circuit breaker for that action?
Mhm. Yeah, so we have strict policies against uh sharing personal identifying information, so things like Snapchat handles or Discord handles, phone numbers, as well as something we call

directing users off platform. So, saying, "Hey, come hang in my, you you Discord server, whatever it is. So, our text filter uh is continually updated and trained to prevent folks from sharing that kind of information because we want people to stay on Roblox stay where we think we have you know, we where we have the most control, where we think it's the safest. And when we detect indicators that people are trying to move off platform, that's also a signal for our investigative teams to look into something and say like why why are they doing that? What what's happening here? Um we also proactively reach out to law enforcement if we see any kind of suspicious behavior like that. Um we get local law enforcement involved as well. So, again, many layers of systems to try and prevent the sharing of that information. Kids are smart. Kids will Kids will, you know, they call Discord the blue app, they call Snapchat the yellow app. Um so, or the ghost app. So, the the language is always evolving, which is why we have to continually tune our

models to to catch those kinds of language. Uh and then the last thing is with facial age estimation, now you just won't simply won't be able to chat with folks that are outside of your age group. Um so, that that risk of grooming of adult to minor grooming um is is significantly reduced because you just you aren't even in the chat to be able to share that information because you wouldn't be in the same age bracket.
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And you launching Roblox Kids for under 9 year old and Roblox Select for over 9 year olds till 17, was that or till 19?
Oh, till 15.
9 to 15, so definitely those two are are very much the ones that will be installed in this household. So, my question is like can you guarantee that my under 9 year old and 9 year old wouldn't see any kind of dating, violence, or mature content on any of these two platforms or these two new products?
Yeah, um look, all of those things are prohibit like dating and romantic and sexual content are prohibited by our standards. Um extreme violence is prohibited and then we have the layer of the of the ratings, the game ratings that also limit what can go in Kids and Select. As we've said, no system is perfect, but we really do believe that this these additional layers of screening that mean that only the most qualified, that the highest quality games that we've reviewed in multiple ways um are getting into Kids and

Select. Um we think it's the best way to prevent that long tail of content while also enabling our community to be creative and to make games for their friends and to play in Roblox Studio and learn how to code and and build their STEM skills and all of that. We we do want to enable that creativity, but we think reaching kids is a privilege and so in order to get that privilege, you have to pass all these layers of screening. We also um the the accounts will be visually distinct. So, if you're looking at your kids' iPad over their shoulder, um Roblox Kids will be a different color than Roblox Select and Roblox Standard. Um it'll also say say Kids and Select up at the top, so just more layers to help parents be able to easily monitor what their kids are up to, make sure they're in the right account. Um then you'll also have the parental controls to be able to look remotely on your own phone. Um I always say like you know, you get to the end of the day as a parent, you've done the dishes, you you sit down on the couch to like watch 20 minutes of something, that's when you have a minute to look at

your phone and say like, what was my daughter playing today? How much time did she spend? Do I want to change any of these settings? Um you probably didn't have time earlier in the day to do that. Um so that's why we want to have that sort of remote control way of doing parental controls.
Luckily, I have some time cuz I I play Roblox games, but uh I bet most parents don't.
I do not. Yeah, I don't have time until that like 9:00 p.m. when I'm finally sitting down thing,
[laughter]
Yeah. Um so Kids and Select, they're coming in June, right?
Yes.
Yes, launching globally in June.
So I re-reinstall those two for my two daughters. What's different? Like what can I can you tell me today that I can hold you to?
Uh when you when you install, first of all, um if you don't go through the age check process after June, you're going to have a very limited set of content that you can play. It's the content that we have more confidence in, it's the higher

quality content, it's where we know that the developers provided us their identification and all kinds of other systems and uh have have been run um to validate both the developer and the content. So that's number one. Number two, which is exactly the way it is today, unless you go through the age check process and demonstrate that you're of a you know, older than nine, you will not have any access to communication. You know, as somebody who's like six or seven years old, you can play all of the games in the the Roblox kids games. Um it's games that we have high confidence in the quality of those games that meet the maturity ratings that we think are appropriate for somebody of that age, all of that. That's what somebody will be able to play. If you age checked and demonstrate that you're, you know, of the Roblox Select age, then you can start getting access to communication. Limited communication when you're over nine, it's, you know, basic communication within experiences.

It's highly filtered. Um it's only with people who have who are of a similar age. And then as you get older, you get slightly more access. And then if you're age checked and you're 16 and over, then you get access to the entire Roblox catalog of content and even more communication features. For Roblox kids, like Eliza said, it looks visually different. Um it has a different kind of chrome color on it. And we wanted to make it easier for parents to understand when they're looking over their kid's shoulder like, "Okay, are they in Roblox kids or are they in Roblox select?" We want to make that very clear. Cuz as Eliza said, you know, we understand that for the vast majority of parents, parental controls comes down to two things. One, do they install the app? And two, when they look over their kid's shoulder at what they're doing on their iPad or their phone or on a computer, what does it look like and do I understand what it is that they're doing? They're not necessarily setting up detailed parental controls and things

like that. And so what we wanted to do is create a product with Roblox kids and select, which is just easier for parents to understand. And I think that's another one of our big learnings over the last couple years is we have all kinds of settings on the platform and way to tune like what content you have access to and communication and limiting kids friends and all of these things, but it's a lot. And we just wanted to really simplify it. And I think that's what we've been able to achieve with the kids select accounts.
The most important thing is that your daughters um verify themselves on their own accounts, right? So they're not handing it to the older one. Um so make sure that's accurate and you can check um uh you know, if your parental controls are connected or in their account directly that the age is correct. Um and then also, once they do that, um once they're in the right bucket, then they're only chatting with their peers. Um and and I really think as as Matt said, that's increasing stability, it's increasing fun. There's all kinds of language that I don't understand at all from the middle school set, you know,

ways of using emojis that are confusing to me that we're all always learning and adding. Um and so then they're going to be be in there talking to their friends and playing the right games.
Well, I want to just say that that Roblox Roblox is truly an amazing platform. It It really enables creativity for kids. I wish I had a Roblox when I was a kid. Uh it unlocks social interaction online and offline. Like I see my daughter playing. We moved to Greece from Finland. They She plays with kids from Finland here, but she also plays with the locals when they go and meet up together and they play together on Roblox. She hasn't had it for a while, so she had to watch while others play. I know that you guys are doing massive investments in safety. Um really really uh unprecedented size of investments. And I very much hope and believe that it will pay off in long term. And I am looking forward to reinstalling once the other Roblox Kids and Roblox Select are launched next

month. Uh I'm looking to verifying my daughter's age and then explaining to my wife why the platform has our trust. So, uh thank you very much for for joining the podcast and explaining all this.
Thank you.
You have me, yes.
Yeah, we really appreciate it.
Thank you. And folks, uh check out roblox.com on on all the uh the information on the safety uh investments they've done and the time out for the for rolling those out. So, um install, verify your age, and uh and stay safe. You did it. You made it to the end of the episode. As a fan of the show, it would help us out if you'd subscribe [music] and leave us a review on the podcast service of your choice. Those stars and likes, while a small action on your part, mean a lot to us and help to grow the show. More importantly, are you a member of the Deconstructor of Fun Slack Group? If you have 5 years or more of games industry experience, go to deconstructoroffun.com/slack

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