Roblox on Kids Safety (Laura Higgens Head of Digital Civility)

everybody today I'm here with Laura Higgins who is a head of digital civility for roblox and so welcome very much Laura but I thought we could first start by just setting the stage in terms of child safety and in particular what what what are the dangers in terms of child safety when it comes to an online presence for example so I've been working in online safety for many many years and I think in my pride my previous role before I came to roblox I was with the UK safe or Internet Center and I ran a helpline there that was dealing with digital harm so I think it's evolved a lot over the years so there are certain things I think you know the big scary things obviously parents are worried about is contact from strangers and things like that but thankfully most people don't have that experience I think sometimes the things that young people really suffer from is

more things like being scammed so we need to make sure that we're giving them those digital literacy skills to recognize when things are a bit off so you know things like you know if somebody's trying to do trades and it's not fair things like that we need to make sure the kids recognize that and of course people saying hurtful things you know we know that happens offline so it's inevitable it's going to happen online but I think you know we can work to make sure that kids feel safe certainly our responsibility here as a platform that's geared towards kids is to really make sure that those safety mechanisms are there as well as a bit of an education message right so kind of cells like in terms of we were to budget those into certain groups one is contact with strangers or people they should be talking to secondly would be exposure to certain types of content that whether it's you know on a communication basis are just stuff that they shouldn't be exposed to depending on their age and third would be for example you know exposure to maybe monetization mechanics or ways in which they could get scammed

or they can lose money just because they're not mature enough to you know be able to deal with whatever is like the three primary buckets I mean I think so yes certainly we actually did a survey last year with parents and and teenagers and and sort of trying to get a feel for what they sorts problems were 89% of the parents actually said they were fearful of online gaming right but 88% of parents so nearly the same number actually said they could see the benefits so things like giving them technical skills and you know and the potential actually for help with future employment I think I recognized in those digital skills are really necessary now for young people growing up the good news is I think tech companies are really working hard to keep people safe not just kids such me you know everyone all of our users so things like you know some of those topics you mentioned so making sure that we have really good

chat filtering for example so within road blocks kids can have text chat with our big players parents can actually turn that off so from our point of view we do a lot of work with parents to make sure they understand that what they can do on the platform to help to protect their kids as well but for example we have really strict filtering which prevents that harmful language and that harmful kind of interaction between players we have human moderators who of course are there to look at any abuse reports that come in we have lots of software on the platform we have a multi layer approach on our platform to really try and pick out all of those things as well as as I say kind of giving people the educational messages as well so they not only use those tools we put some of those safeguards in to prevent harm right but also making sure that if something does happen they also know how to manage it well I was hoping we could also talk about sort of the legal and regulatory environment of framework today and as a game maker game developer

it seems like the the two that are most well-known are a Coppa and gdpr and I was wondering if you could kind of explain what those two things are and what they mean you know just not in too much depth at a high level how should we be you know sort of thinking about copper and GDP are so coca is a u.s. piece of making their legislation yeah it is Children's Online Privacy Protection Act essentially it means that no companies can gather information and data from under 13s or store it without parental permission so essentially it's around advertising to kids and things like that right Judy PR is a European version of Privacy Act which is a which it dictates how you can gain information about users of all ages ours is an age specific how you store that information and it also gives the right to arranger so if people you know store cookies on your websites and things like that you actually have the right to have that removed very quickly right and then in terms of what the

practical sort of you know impact from a game developer perspective would be it sounds like a couple things that you you talked about well I mean I think the way that then I thought about it before is one is you know the ability to advertise or not the ability to gather information from the users or not and then the way that that kind of practically implements itself in games is often like at each gate and depending on the age that people put then that would dictate whether you know we can advertise them dictate whether we could collect information from them but are there other things like what what are other things that game developers need to think about besides just those things in HD for example so I think one thing that's really interesting is around people's right to privacy versus safety and we believe here that you know safety always has to be the priority you can't offset people's rights of privacy against that so from our point

of view we would rather get more information more data and have that kind of massive amount of data so we can help protect the community for example you know should the worst happen and law enforcement come to us we've got that information that we can give to them there are of course a lot of adult platforms where adults are saying we don't want any of my information stored at all but if something were to happen then there's no recourse there either so I think you know anything where it's children facing you really need to be saying look we will store your data safely you know of course you know you have to be responsible with people's data and explain what you're gonna do with it actually and why you'll gathering that information but you know you're not just doing it because you can and you're doing it to protect them and as long as that's clear and you're doing it appropriate I think it's the right thing to do okay and then maybe we could talk more specifically in terms of you your role and robots and so could you maybe we could start by telling us a little bit more about yourself and like what is

your role here at roblox and and kind of what you're doing and then maybe from there we can talk about what roblox does specifically from you know a policy perspective to help keep kids safe okay so as I mentioned I've worked in the kind of online safety and services that are supporting vulnerable people for most of my working career and so in my prior role I headed up I set up and several help lines that kind of safeguard digital safeguarding and I'm particularly focused on supporting children okay so I've been working in that for a long time and I built really good relationships with a lot of tech companies while I was there so I sat on the advisory boards of Twitter and snapchat and then later robots so in our relationship with them is quite long and we kind of grew together really then when we started talking about how robots really worked you know they've always been very open and honest about all the systems policies and why we do things and it was really interesting to me like

this focus around civility and I think you know it's such an innovative day one of the first companies to talk about it the idea being a we have quite a young quite often player base they start out coming into our platform kind of a lot longer than perhaps in social media right because of coops but actually so we can obviously we have those tools to keep them safe Safety's number one and that's fine where else can we do you know kids kids love to learn you can kind of long to them shaped behaviors and attitudes so we were men sort of looking at what comes next actually it's that giving them some life skills that they could take off the platform okay there are actually proper skills we all need as human beings so you know the platform is fun it's around play that's the idea but actually there's a learning element there as well right so this idea of civility is kind of how to have empathy how to be kind to other players about teamwork and communication skills and so that just seemed like such a

wonderful opportunity so I came in to do that and then there's the education so I work in the community safety team so it's around education so helping parents to feel confident in supporting their children yeah and confident in our platform you know teaching them how the tools work that we have there we have a whole range of things for parents that they can kind of curate the experience that their children have on the platform then the aging up thing you know as I say a lot of people came to her platform when they were 8 9 10 right they're still with us now at 15 16 17 how do we make sure that they're having a really positive and healthy time winner on the platform so you know we're really looking about what the community needs and my role kind of sits across all of that really to try to listen to the community but also to make sure that they're safe as well yeah so you meant to know a lot of you know pretty interesting issues I'm was wondering if we could kind of go back and unpack a look some of those hands a

little bit more so the first thing you mentioned was this thing about civility and mourning so what are specific roblox initiatives or things that you guys are implementing to try and make or try to foster an environment that where people are more civil you know I mean the Internet can be kind of you know kind of a you know nasty space and you know sometimes especially social media people you know be very mean to one another and but especially with kids like are there any are there any initiatives or things from a roblox perspective that you guys can do to try and foster this kind of more positive assignment so we have over 2 million game developers around the world creating only experiences on robots we don't make the games and we don't tell them what to do right but we do have a team of people here who support them everything from our education team who work with coding camps and teach these kind of nice early stage skills right through to our developer relations team who support some of our devs have gone on to have

their own studios you know that I fashion or game makers know but they still need a bit of guidance and support when it comes to things like marketing and all of those country listening skills really so we're really lucky that we can provide all of that I think when it comes to things like dripping those messages user experiences or what's gonna be important when it comes to game development right of course yes what they learn really quickly is that people not having a good time on on their game they will leave that game and go somewhere else right so very quickly you see them kind of going okay how are we going to encourage this positivity those opportunities for teamwork and camraderie and all the good things that happen there are gaming communities when they get that right there the games that go on to be really successful right so it kind of light it sounds like what you're saying is you have this huge community of developers and developers are the ones that make the games you guys kind of control the platform but by influencing the developers and letting the developers understand how important it is to have this kind of you know civil environment

in this positive environment that that's kind of how you guys are influencing the overall platform it's all right absolutely got it so that you know helping them to understand those things helps rather than be just sitting here going you should organize because I don't work there era you know they have to it's their community they have to build it themselves now the second what the other thing you mentioned was education and certainly you can see you know a deep connection between a lot of things that are being developed by very young kids and and being able to having to develop a lot of hard technical skills and you know having to understand so many things in order to build a game you know once they you know build a game and then to manage a big team that they admit that they have and so I you know I'm familiar with like you know robox developer conference but wondering what other things are you know in terms of missions and things of Robloxia for that educational component that you mentioned so we've goals around the

world and so you know robots are quite often found in classrooms we do coding camps all over the world so school holiday programs right we have online tutorials we have videos that kids to watch copy we have physical people if they need to reach out with a question yeah and actually they have their own community as well so they have a huge discord group where they all share ideas and things that have gone well and things that haven't gone so well and we have forums where they communicate with each other and so we will support that as well because it's really important that they have the professional help from the company but also that peer-to-peer support I think one of the things that makes our platform so unique is our diverse community right we have so over 40% of our players of girls which is really unusual and we encourage that and sort of so you know really pushing those stems gets skills that they need and encouraging them to go and

do those not just on our platform but actually saying you know what you can ask to do those things at school and at college and you should be you know we can all look for careers within gaming remembering the game creation and development isn't just about the coding skills you know it's art and it's music and it's not really telling and it's all of those things as well generally I would say our community is really nice ok but they tend to be so supportive right we see it so you know you mentioned the developer conference the interactions you see between people you know they're like a family right and so when somebody's having a bad time everyone groups together to fix it right and I think that just with we're so lucky and hopefully if we can kind of build that and encourage it they don't just do that on our platform we know they're not just on roblox they're on roblox and everywhere else and I want them to take that positivity onto those other platforms as well got it and then the third thing you mentioned

was actually the involvement of the parents and so maybe I'm a bad parent but you know my kids actually play roblox quite a bit but I actually don't you know I don't I don't know what their city and whatever so could you talk a little bit more about you know I actually have no idea that there was you know things actually on roblox for the parents so like what are some of those things so I mean we would generally encourage for under 13 so parents are a bit more involved with their kids then once you've given them some of those skills and they know how to manage things then you can let them have more freedom and I would definitely say once they're in their teens they probably don't want mum and dad over my shoulder all the time and that's fine it's their space we should allow that but yes certainly were the smaller ones we do encourage the parents sign in with the right take birth cause we have tools that slightly different for under 13 days writings for exactly that reason so if parents can turn chat on or off or

just friends only depending on what they're comfortable with and I would suggest you know for the younger players you might want to be more restrictive and then let it go as you kind of doing stuff with them it's a pain controlled area so you kids can't just go back in and switch it back off when you're not looking it is very much for you yeah we have a curated list of games as well which parents can opt into which is more suitable for the very young players it's really really sort of more child-friendly than some of our other games and then of course because we are a platform for all ages you know some some of those games that are kind of more geared towards teenagers that's a parental choice about where you want to be I would say from our point of view it's really important that parents get involved as much as possible this is not about sitting and watching everything but just playing games showing an interesting questions and those sorts of things which I know a lot of parents are busy and it just feels a bit like oh you know this is my time for a bit of quiet while you were

in a game but actually what we hear time and time again when parents do take that step and go right we're gonna have family gaming they're really enjoying it too okay and it gives those teachable moments where parents can kind of talk through why do you think that play I just did that or you know there are really good opportunities for discussions about behavior as well as kind of the tools for how to do things and again if something if you saw somebody being mean would you know how to report it those sorts of things doing it together is really good it's really empowering for kids and it gives you a bit confidence as a parent right enough I was wanted to expand a little bit more about when you were about how the the community in the environment is so positive inclusive and certainly you know especially for kids I think having a place where they feel very safe online is very important critical to them and so are there specific things I mean there's a lot of things that you've mentioned but are there any other things that you know as a game developer we should be thinking

about to try and also create that type of positive environment that you guys have created yeah with in roblox um so I think having that mix of tools is really good right there's not one thing that does everything so of course you know the increased use of machine learning is fantastic so kind of managed some of the new ease yeah so that the spam and they're you know those little little things you don't need humans for ultimately always gonna need humans as moderators as well though because you need that contextual decision-making but we pre moderate content that's uploaded into games so any video assets sound those sorts of things and images is all pre moderated before it's ever allowed on the platform to try to to minimize those sorts of risks on our platform again we don't have any photos it's all avatars of players and things which of course that makes it safe for generally right yeah I would say things like when you're building out your games you know

being culturally aware you know you're talking about safe spaces we're a global platform we have players all over the world and different countries have different sensibilities right things and so you know we work with safety organizations all over the world so they feed us that information so we know what's appropriate in Germany or Latin America you know we don't want people to be harmed by things that they see on our platform or things they hear so we always you know for example in Germany there are quite strict rules about what can be in games then it aimed towards children right so things like guns really is a big no-no whereas in the states it's kind of normal so just being mindful of that and how you promote things in different countries is really important very recently there has been like you know new YouTube real change where now all of your YouTube content has to be you know specifically designated as either kid directed or not and in terms of you know

different types of policies or legal issues that that will be coming up do you foresee any other types of things that will have to happen in the industry to make things safer for kids I mean I can't speak specifically to the eg point better I think it's been difficult for people because it's such a big change right so they feel threatened by it but you know ultimately you you know safety before money yeah oh it has to be the way yeah I'm out ultimately I think it's gonna be a good thing for people yeah families are a huge audience especially for gaming I'm actually having the trust of parents today and your ethical you're doing the right thing you know and it's not just about monetizing and I think you're more likely to actually grow your audience so that's one thing in terms of other things that are going to be happening so in the United Kingdom there's been a huge piece of work around online hands the latest being that they're considering putting a regulator

in place okay so there's a an ombudsman currently called Ofcom and it's looking likely that they might be the people so they would deal with complaints about how tech companies deal with things and that's gonna be you know that will have quite a big impact for anyone who's operating in the UK then and it also impacts talking about things like transparency reporting so currently companies only need to either submit when they have a government request that you know takedowns and things like that of harmful content this is now going to be much broader so it's going to talk about things like how many how many reports have you had from the public and how long did it take you to deal with they're mean they're quite big things are going to impact on companies so the Information Commissioner's Office has also been doing a big piece of work in the UK which is slightly starting to kind of grow out now as well about how data is managed and for users on platforms Island of following suit there's already been changes in New

Zealand and or straight introduced specific laws around digital harm so I think we're gonna see more of this everywhere so lower one of the things you mentioned is safety versus you know revenue maximization and so yeah I assume that roblox you guys have taken the safety path and and obviously done incredibly well from a revenue perspective but I would say that in a lot of companies when they're thinking about you know safety versus making money all too often you know more money so by this I mean when it comes to kids though these companies should be more careful right I mean and so how do you think developers should be thinking about that that choice so there's quite often you may hear the term safety by design being adopted a lot around the world and essentially what they're trying to say is before you ever get in front of the public particularly if they're more vulnerable like kids right

but you need to have the house in order you need to have these things built in right from the ground so from the minute you're designing your game you need to think about how that's going to impact on your players you can't retrofit safety you've seen we've seen it so many times where the forms are like oh let's just want and then it goes really popular and then suddenly they can't manage it and write and get people get hurt this is the reality do it properly or don't do it at all I think is the message yes and I know that that sometimes you can feel ready scary for very small studios just starting out because you know they're like well with no money I can't do this yeah but in a long time it pays out it really does and also you know there's a lot of things there's a lot of collaboration particularly in gaming industry we share best practices with lots of other companies you know there's that just recently a big announcement from Microsoft arounds at the collaborative project around recognizing greement behavior which we were part of as well and that's actually going to be

free to people to use so you know there are things out there for people there's really very little excuse for not building that safety and right from the beginning got it and last question I have is just looking into the future what do you think we go from here when comes to kid safety whether it's from a legal or policy perspective what do you think happens or are we there like we have enough protections no we cannot stop we have never stopped getting better okay ever our community is only gonna get bigger so we need to keep investing as as the community grows we need to grow out all these tools we need to innovate we need to keep looking for these you know we have machine learning we have very IVs wonderful tools we need to keep looking at inventive ways we can use those right they actually cost saving as well because they're not all people we need to listen to the communities more we need to find out what the real problems are and as I say this collaborative stuff that really works I think but yet keep educating keeps driving and I'm just trying to make sure that you know people having a

healthy positive experience when they're online you know that's what we go there for we go there to have a good time great well thank you very much for your time here with Laura Higgins head of digital civility here at robot [Music] [Music]