Roblox CEO clashes with reporters when pressed about child safety
Roblox Corp. CEO David Baszucki is in the spotlight today following a freshly-uploaded New York Times interview on the Hardfork podcast. Hosts Casey Newton and Kevin Roose pressed Baszucki on the topic of child safety on Roblox. This concern is fresh in the public eye after parents and state attorneys general sued the company for failing to stop young users from being targeted by predators.
Baszucki went on the podcast to discuss new age-gating technologies being incorporated in its moderation strategy—and proceeded to spar with Newton and Roose while defending the platform's track record on safety.
"It got tense," reads a headline documenting a transcript of the exchange. "Tense" may be underselling it. Baszucki grew more combative after Roose asked about an October 2024 report from now-shuttered activist fund Hindenburg research accusing the company of being "a pedophile hellscape for kids."
"Fun. Lets keep going down this," Baszucki replied. "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?"
Baszucki further pressed the host about his own "research" into Roblox's trust and safety efforts before falling back to explain that AI models are becoming more effective at content moderation—then grew sarcastic after asking Roose if he would "pick" those improved models.
"Good, so youre aligning with what we did. High-five," he said, briefly ignoring follow-up questions. "Thank you for supporting our Roblox decision matrix... Im so glad you guys are aligned with the way we run Roblox. High-five... Is this a stealth interview where actually you love everything were doing and youre here to stealthily support it?"
Baszucki seemed eager to discuss prediction markets and other tech topicsSome of Baszucki's responses seem to indicate he was growing annoyed at having to talk about moderation rather than other industry topics. Newton explained they had been told Baszucki wanted to come on the podcast to discuss the new technology, but Baszucki seemed to have a different understanding of the situation.
"I want to highlight, I came here because I love your podcast and came to talk about everything. So if our PR people said, 'Lets talk about age-gating for an hour,' Im up for it, but I love your pod. I thought I came here to talk about everything."
After Newton observed he was "a little bit frustrated," Baszucki denied the claim and resurfaced the topic of his purpose for coming on the show. "I thought we were going to be talking about fun, funny things in the industry and all of that. So Im not frustrated, Im 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 Im happy to talk about whatever you guys want."
He seemed more engaged when turning to the topic of betting markets like Polymarket, and how they might be better at predicting results than journalists. He was opened to introducing prediction market experiences into Roblox so long as they didn't dispense Robux (Roblox's in-app currency) or in-game items.
Throughout the interview, Baszucki argued that internal metrics inside Roblox prove that it's an "amazing" platform for kids and that the company is seeing constant improvements to its safety features thanks in part to AI.
"I think were 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," he said when asked if he thought the company didn't had a problem with predators on Roblox.
He at one point echoed comments made to Eurogamer earlier this year on the topic of parents' decision to let their kids play Roblox despite the widespread safety concerns. "A parent is the ultimate arbiter of responsibility. And if a parent out there, for any reason, is not comfortable with their kid going to the park, not comfortable with their kid playing with a certain toy, not comfortable being on Roblox, who am I to say, right?"
"I do leave that to the parent's responsibility."
Game Developer has reached out to Roblox Corp. for comment on this story and will update it upon the company's response.
