Roblox CEO says he wants to protect your kids — but you're going to need to pitch in, too.

Do you let your kids play Roblox?

Many, many parents do. The gaming platform has a huge audience — some 85 million people visit it daily — and about 40% of them are under the age of 13.

But Roblox's youthful user base is also a question mark for the company. Some people worry that the platform, which hosts millions of user-generated games and encourages kids to chat with each other, is an attractive target for predators. Others simply worry that there isn't enough oversight at the giant digital playground, which allows kids to play everything from dress-up games to ones that mimic school shootings (Roblox recently shut one of those down).

Meanwhile, Roblox is trying to convince investors — who currently value the company at $40 billion — that its future growth will come from older teens and adults.

It's a complicated question for Roblox CEO David Baszucki, who co-founded the company back in 2004 and launched it in 2006. On the one hand, Baszucki is trying to convince regulators and parents around the world that Roblox is safe because his company spends a lot of time and effort policing the platform; on the other hand, Roblox owes its success to the fact that it's a platform — just like YouTube, or Facebook, or TikTok — whose users decide what they want out of it.

I talked to Baszucki for my Channels podcast, and our conversation ended up touching on a wide range of topics, including the company's relationship with Apple and Google, and its approach to intellectual property. This edited excerpt focuses on Roblox's double-edged age issue:

Peter Kafka: Roblox has a big, young user base. You get a lot of criticism about it. Sometimes the concerns are about grooming on the platform. Some parents just think the games are uncouth or just don't like the idea of kids talking to other kids in an unregulated way. Has your thinking about the issue of kids on your platform changed, or has it been consistent since you started?

David Baszucki: I think in retrospect, when we think about starting the company for all ages, 18 years ago, we're very glad we did that. It was a really hard thing to do. It's much easier to build a gaming platform that's 13-and-up, which is where many social media apps are today.

And when something's built for 13-and-up, it can create a situation where you don't go straight after the real big challenges. For us, literally in the first few months of being live, we started building our first safety systems and made it a top priority. There was a time when the four of us who were the Roblox founders were in the room moderating. Each one of us took a day.

That has evolved over the last 16 to 18 years to the development of over 200 AI systems, automatic filtering of all text on the platform, automatic filtering with human supplement of all images on the platform. I would say over time we have gotten better, better, better, better, better. [But] any single issue for us is one too many.

And we do treat any issue as one too many, but we're very optimistic that we're going very much in the right direction and that the value of embracing this prevents what happens when 8, 9, and 10 year olds are on a 13-and-up platform that doesn't have these same ways of maintaining safety and civility.

So it's a hard challenge. We've embraced it.

Do you feel like the perception of the brand has changed over time? I can talk to my coworkers who've got young kids, and they say, "I don't want my kid to get on there. I want them to stay on Minecraft. I'm worried about Roblox." And they might not even be able to articulate what their concern is, but they've just heard it's bad, or they're worried about it. Does that filter back to you? I'm assuming you guys are hearing that all the time.

We take that very, very seriously.

What we have seen over the last four to five years — so many parents recognize the benefits and differences between a 3D connection platform versus maybe a social media platform where you're watching videos or you're sharing pictures of yourself.

And during COVID many, many, many parents around the world said, "Oh my gosh, this is a way for my kids to stay in touch with their friends" in a way parallel to maybe when I was younger on a rainy day, I used the telephone and I'd call my friend up and we'd hang out on the phone for half an hour. People are doing that on Roblox right now.

I feel there's a general recognition in society that connection is a positive. We see it all the time on Roblox. And I do think parents are getting more savvy about that type of connection versus short-form video by yourself or getting catfished by sharing your picture on a social media platform. Once again, we take everything very seriously, but the vast majority of parents we run into are very supportive of our platform.

You talked to the BBC recently and you were quoted saying, essentially: "If you're not comfortable, don't let your kids be on Roblox."

On the one hand, that totally makes sense to me. I'm a parent, I get the logic of it. On the other hand, I could imagine parents saying, "Wait — you're putting all the responsibility on me and you've built this platform. Isn't it your responsibility to control this thing?"

I would put a bracket around that single statement. And that bracket was a dialogue we were having around just so much we do, because we know not all parents are able to get on the platform with their kids and set parental controls. There are many parents who are so busy in their life — they hand their youngster an iPad and say, "Go play Roblox."

So we have to be ready for the parent who isn't able to be involved. And we have to be, I would say — even from a company values and moral responsibility — driving the vision on that to be a great place for civility and optimism.

In the middle of all of that we do, I would say definitely to parents: "We're doing a lot, like we're gonna focus on it whether you're an involved parent or not. If you're uncomfortable with your 12-year-old in any situation, whether it's Roblox, whether it's the community pool, whether it's the playground, whether it's anything … we stand behind you."

There's a debate going on now — it's really between Apple and Meta — about who should be responsible for determining how old a user is. Where do you come down on this? Should this be managed on the device level? Should it be the application?

We would love it if every device in the world said the user of this is exactly 11.2 years old and it's been validated. The reality is we can't wait for that. And the reality is we're not sure if and when we will have that.

We've taken the notion that we will get better, better, better, irrespective of that. And if we get a signal like that, we will welcome it. We are leaning into our own age estimation. We are leaning into, I think, a really interesting area, which is not just 12-and-under, but the 13-through-17 area. And the 13-through-17 area is — independent of age estimation — very sensitive because that's a very sensitive part of the life of young people.

And in most platforms right now, they can chat unfiltered with whoever they want. A lot of things happen in that area.

So I think we're moving to a point where, for older people who we know who they are — you could imagine you and I are going to play poker and we're going to talk about whatever we want. We're going to not be filtered, possibly not be recorded, like let's embrace free speech and the laws of the physical world.

But for 13-through-17-year-olds, we're gonna be very thoughtful about who they chat with, and if and when they get to know who that person is in the real world.