Roblox’s top executive was on the defensive during a widely watched podcast appearance that was supposed to promote new resources for parents, but which instead honed in on the platform’s child-protection record. The conversation, which focused on a new age verification requirement for accessing messaging, grew testy as the questioning probed whether Roblox had in the past grown too quickly relative to the amount of money it invested in safety.
At stake is the balancing act confronting one of the world’s largest user-generated gaming platforms: how to police millions of users’ ages, safeguard privacy and halt harms like grooming, scamming and explicit content without ruining experiences for legitimate players. With tens of millions of daily players — many of them children, for whom the platform is as ubiquitous as a pencil (around 90 percent have an account) — changes to rules about chat and verification are felt in schools, living rooms and developer communities around the globe.
Age Checks and the Face Scan Debate on Roblox
Roblox intends to require that users pass an age verification check before accessing chat, which will likely be some kind of facial recognition. The company characterizes the move as age assurance, rather than full identity verification, designed to make it more difficult for adults to pretend they are younger users and to customize safety controls based on a user’s likely age group.
Privacy advocates start from practical concerns: Who is seeing the images, how long are they being held and what are the error rates among different ages and skin tones — and how will appeals work if a teenager is erroneously pegged as underage? Roblox has relied on third-party vendors for verification in the past and says its own system is a mix of automated and human review to minimize bias and incorrect decisions, though it has not yet released detailed performance data from the new system.
Context matters. Regulators and standards bodies, from the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office to the Age Verification Providers Association, have pressed platforms toward “age assurance” rather than blanket ID checks, while facial age estimation has been a tool of choice across the industry. Instagram and other major platforms have already used similar approaches in pilot programs, claiming faster user onboarding and less data retention than document-based verification.
AI Moderation Is Needed, But Not Enough
Things heated up even more during the interview when it was suggested that better AI moderation, and not just gates, is actually the real unlock for child safety. Roblox has invested heavily in automated classifiers of text, images, audio and 3D assets as they are uploaded to the platform in an effort to identify grooming patterns, sexual content and monetary scams before they can spread. The Communications Decency Act and company transparency reports indicate a three-tiered layered approach involving proactive detection, behavioral signals, and human escalation.
Experts warn that AI alone can fall short of high-context harms. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the nonprofit Thorn have both reported how grooming typically happens in private chats over time, bypassing keyword filters and other standard flags. That’s why safety experts are increasingly calling for a balanced approach: age assurance to reduce risky contact, AI for scale, friction for unknown connections and clear pathways on how kids report and get quick human help.
Scale is the stubborn variable. With a daily user base of well over 70 million, even an infinitesimally small false-negative rate can result in thousands of missed incidents, and overly harsh filters frustrate creators and older teenagers who rely on voice and text to create together. Publishing precision and recall statistics on safety models, broken down by age group and language, would bolster credibility and allow researchers to benchmark progress.
A Platform Under Growing Scrutiny From Regulators
Roblox’s audience now spans ages, with the bulk of new growth coming from those 17 and older, according to Apealea Sherrod, Roblox’s vice president of content and digital community.
It is still a place where many kids under 13 petulantly insist to their parents that they should be able to play. That mix makes anything more than the vaguest of guidelines very rich policy terrain: The same tools that let older players engage in richer social features can impose risks on younger ones. The Internet Watch Foundation has reported record numbers of images and videos of child sexual abuse on the web in recent years, putting pressure on any platform with open chat or user-generated content.
Regulatory headwinds are also mounting. COPPA enforcement in the U.S., as well as more general FTC action on deceptive design and weak parental controls, have also transformed industry practice there. The U.K.’s Online Safety Act and codes from the Information Commissioner’s Office stress age-appropriate design and risk mitigation, while E.U. rules mandate large platforms to identify systemic risks and record mitigations. For Roblox, the introduction of the new age check is as much about regulatory posture as product.
What to Watch as Roblox Unveils Changes
Transparency will be the test. Real numbers about verification accuracy, appeals turnaround times, correlation between chat volume and incident rates and time-to-removal will be all the more powerful in this space. Independent auditors — whether child-safety labs or privacy certification programs — could substantiate claims and allow parents and developers to make informed trade-offs.
Equity is another key indicator. Roblox should disclose data on how well age estimation works across demographic groups and devices, as well as fallback measures in place for when a camera is nonexistent. Clear, direct-to-parent controls and educational materials that take the mystery out of them will ensure a streamlined experience and less locking down for legitimate tween users.
The tense exchange illustrated a larger truth: safety debates on enormous platforms are inherently uncomfortable because they expose trade-offs. If Roblox lines up its new verification push with relentless data showing what works and human support that’s faster than before, and keeps on teaming up with researchers and child safety groups, the heat from this interview can turn into tangible gains for the kids who use it most.
