New York Times podcast hosts Casey Newton and Kevin Roose have published a “tense” interview with Roblox CEO David Baszucki when he was questioned over the company’s child safety measures.
In an interview on the Hard Fork podcast, when asked why he was “so confident” that the company’s child safety measures were working, Baszucki wouldn’t be drawn on individual cases, but insisted “we’re not doing this because of any laws that are coming, we think it’s the right thing to do.”
He did not respond directly to the question, “you don’t think you have a problem with predators on the platform?” instead replying: “I think we’re doing an incredible job at innovating relative to the number of people on our platform and the hours, in really leaning into the future of how this is going to work.”
Asked about last year’s Hindenburg Research report that claimed Roblox was failing to protect young users from sexual predators, Baszucki was combative, replying: “Fun. Let’s keep going down this. And so, first off, Hindenburg is no longer in existence, correct? So, you should report on that. They went out of business for some reason. The other thing is, have you researched that information? Because you’re asking me about this, I’m curious if you’ve done your own research.”
When challenged and asked if he was “getting a little bit frustrated,” Baszucki insisted: “I’m actually not frustrated. I just, I’m so excited to talk – I thought we were going to be talking about fun, funny things in the industry and all of that. So I’m not frustrated, I’m just kind of figuring out how much fun time I have with you guys and how much fun time we have versus kind of this superfocus. But I’m happy to talk about whatever you guys want”.
Host Roose also directly asked Baszucki if Roblox would “fix the problems with safety on [the] platform” by the time his three-and-a-half-year-old was old enough to ask to play. Though stressing that “a parent is the ultimate arbiter of responsibility”, the CEO replied: “I’m going to go more out of the box than that. Roblox is an amazing platform right now for your kid. And I’m happy to go deep with you, possibly nondisclose you, show you metrics, all of that, to do whatever it takes to get you over the hump”.
The full interview can be read on the NYT website.
Roblox has been updating and adding new safety features to its platform over the past year, including a “sensitive issues” content tag to its experiences feature and voluntary facial recognition checks to restrict communication between minros and adults.
In November 2024, it introduced protections that meant under 13s were no longer able to access direct messaging on platform chats, and limited what messages they could broadcast in games and experiences.
