As a “pedophile hellscape” roblox The company’s CEO has finally added a primary measure to prevent children from being exploited through its network of games and chatrooms used by 151 million people. new York Times Hard Fork, a podcast about child safety. And it didn’t go very well. it In fact It didn’t go well.
roblox It is coming under increasing scrutiny after failing for decades to implement even the most basic protective measures to keep its pre-teen players away from the networks of pedophiles who use games to find victims. Described last year by Hindenburg Research as “a pedophile hellscape for children”, the game promptly introduced a new assortment of measures last October that did nothing, leading to a significant increase in legal interest this year. Three months earlier, the state of Louisiana had announced its intention to sue roblox After realizing the dangers it was allowing, Kentucky and Texas also joined in. These actions come in addition to 35 other ongoing lawsuits, including one filed just yesterday by a Kuyaho County family robloxIt was allegedly used in the tragic and all too common abuse of their 13 year old son.
On Wednesday of this week, roblox announced that it is introducing a new way of checking players’ age before they can access chat, this time using facial recognition to try to limit players to only talking to others in their age range. Such facial ID checks have become common in the UK following the notoriously harsh UK Online Safety Act, which requires porn sites and other age-restricted outlets to verify the age of users. This has led to sites like
Regarding this rollout, new York Times‘Talked to Casey Newton roblox Co-founder and CEO David Baszucki about the new plans, and whether they can really help. It doesn’t start well. When Baszucki was asked about the “scope of the problem” of poachers in the application, he said, “We think of it not just as a problem, but also as an opportunity.” Ah, the good old opportunities available when your company’s product is rife with pedophilia. He continued, underscoring how amazing it is that young people can create and communicate together, how they have “150 million daily activations, 11 billion hours a month, like what’s the best way to move this forward.” This is the most astonishingly mute response.
Newton attempts to get some sensible answers from Baszucki about how ID checks will work, and why they will not be avoided as easily as many others, and amid Baszucki’s corporate waffle he is told that roblox Apparently he is always on the lookout for “strange signs” and will ask for further age verification if these appear, although he did not explain what these signs might be, nor what these further investigations would be. But then Newton asks the most painfully important question: Why did it take 19 years to even out? Effort Preventing adults from talking to children?
Baszucki responded by talking about its development robloxText filtering technology to identify inappropriate language and personalized information over the last two decades, and how it’s always improving, which is great but obviously not relevant to the question. Newton is having none of it, responding, “Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. When I read about these lawsuits and these investigations into the company, it doesn’t seem like predators are having that much difficulty avoiding your filters… so I’m curious what makes you so confident that things are working?” Baszucki’s response is inconsistent.
“I don’t want to comment on it. We look at their chat logs. And we can see interesting and, at times, ways of people trying to – I would say, at times people who are quite sophisticated, and I’m not going to say all of them, at times kids over the age of 13, who are actually not running in a filtered situation in another app, are, unfortunately, figuring out how to get to another platform where they can have unfiltered communication, where they Can share images, that’s one of the primary things we’re trying to get people to do on our platform. I would say we’re not waiting for the rest of the industry, for example, to do all this and do the same with age estimation: we’re just doing it right.”
Newton remains impressively quiet, and instead of explaining that this answer has nothing to do with the situation, nor how incredible it actually is that the CEO of a company would say “I don’t want to comment on this” when asked why he has confidence in an age-old technology that clearly doesn’t work, he instead explains that the lawsuits are demonstrating that “roblox “As you know, where hunters go to find children.”
Things become more tense, as Baszucki tries to claim it is a misrepresentation, and when pressed on whether he actually believes it roblox “I think we’re doing an incredible job at innovating relative to the number of people and hours on our platform, really focusing on the future of how it’s going to work,” one hunter answers the problem.
What becomes so soberingly clear is that even now, after a year of extraordinary investigation and legal pressure, Baszucki still has no grip on the situation. To have so little preparation for such obvious questions, to have no coherent response to why the new technology would be effective, and to go out of their way to appear so disinterested in the topic, is astonishing. As he presses the ease with which predators can suggest to children to talk to them on another platform, Baszucki eventually stumbles into textual ambiguity:
“I would actually say that’s a very simple red flag. Like, it seems like the text filters out many previous generations. So I would say the technologies are much more sophisticated than that. We’re constantly getting better at that and sometimes it’s counterproductive. Like, we’re getting into, you know, if we were going to try to cryptographically exchange how to share your Snap handle or any handle. We’d be looking at some of those starting out.” As such we will inevitably have to stop in the future.”
It seems that the CEO believes that the scale of roblox It’s an excuse to somehow justify its problems, repeatedly approaching its 150 million users and 11 billion hours per month, as if that makes everything clear. But more problematically, as Newton explains that the company wants these numbers to grow, Baszucki immediately starts talking about what an amazing financial opportunity this is. given roblox is really struggling to convert those users into money, it seems like he’s only talking to investors and analysts who are increasingly worried robloxLack of profits. Many responses begin with a very irrelevant attempt to avoid the question, and then end with words like “And you can imagine?” roblox At 20-X of this scale, 50 percent of the gaming market is in one place. This is so much nonsense!
But nothing is as silly as Baszucki’s response to a question on the Hindenburg Research report on the scale of the pedophile issue. Hindenburg was an activist short-selling research firm that would investigate companies for fraud, malpractice, and indeed rampant use by predators, until its creator decided to dissolve the group in January of this year. At the time of the report, Baszucki said the claim was false. roblox had reduced its spending on trust and security, so Newton asked for specific information.
“Funny,” says Baszucki, a man who appears pathologically incapable of reading the room. “Let’s continue this below. And so, first of all, the Hindenburg no longer exists, right? So, you’re supposed to report on that. They went out of business for some reason…” He then demanded to know if Newton had researched the answer for himself, before saying that it’s because they’ve shifted so much of the safety regulation onto AI, all the while sounding absolutely furious that he was being asked. He then demands that Newton agree that if AI is more effective, it is better to use it, and when Newton does so, Baszucki begins to behave incredibly immature. “Okay, so you’re joining in with what we did. High-five.” Then when Newton tries to ask a question, he interrupts, saying, “Thank you for supporting us roblox decision matrix, Then he interrupts and says, “I’m so glad you guys are adjusting to our way of running robloxTo clap in the air for applause,” Do you think he’s done? No, Yet he interrupts the question, saying, “Is this a secret interview where you actually love everything we’re doing and you’re secretly here to support it?”
And he doesn’t stop. When co-host Kevin Roose tried to get things back on track, Baszucki continued to follow the same pathetic line. Challenged by how AI has proven to be very ineffective for social media companies, he just kept saying this. The only thing that stopped the outrage was allowing the CEO to talk about PolyMarket, a cryptoscam-based prediction market that allowed people to bet on ridiculous things like awards ceremonies and future weather patterns. Some people believe this is becoming a useful way to predict the markets, and that group includes Baszucki…and I can’t believe I’m typing this…trying to put this in roblox So that children can gamble.
He wants to find a way to do this that is “legal” and “educational”, at which point the podcast hosts begin openly mocking the stupidity. And then, thank God, their time is up.