How old are you really? Inside Roblox’s new campaign to verify user ages

SAN MATEO, Calif. — One morning in late May, an 11-year-old armed with a fake mustache had a mission: fool Roblox’s age-estimation tool into thinking he was older. But moments after Cole Moretti looked into the camera, the system flagged him as a child between the ages of 9 and 12. Moretti was one of several children brought in by NBC News to try the technology at Roblox’s headquarters. “Sorry, you can tell your friends at school it doesn’t work,” Eliza Jacobs, Roblox’s vice president of safety product policy, told Moretti, as she held the iPad in front of him. Moretti’s failed disguise was part of a recent demonstration where the company gave NBC News an exclusive look at the biometric age-checking tool that, starting this month, will be used to place users into age-based accounts. The platform has touted its age-checking technology, which rolled out globally earlier this year, as it tries to address persistent child safety concerns and reassure users, parents and investors that it is taking steps to keep younger users in age-appropriate spaces. Since its launch in 2006, Roblox has become the biggest social gaming platform for kids around the world, with its sprawling virtual ecosystem of user-made games, called “experiences.” The company has cracked down on in-game communication between users as numerous states and families allege the platform has become a hunting ground for child predators. Now, Roblox is launching separate age-based accounts for minors. Those ages 5 to 8 will be placed in Roblox Kids accounts, which disable all messaging by default and restrict users to games with a content maturity label of “minimal” or “mild.” Users ages 9 to 15 will be in Roblox Select accounts, which gradually introduce more chat functions and allow access to games up to “moderate” content maturity. Users 16 and up will generally have the full suite of Roblox games and chat functions. It’s a setup that builds on the platform’s recent rule change requiring all users to provide a government ID to prove their age, or to undergo biometric age checks to use the chat function. That process automatically estimates users’ ages and permits them to chat only with others estimated to be in similar age ranges. The ramped-up safety effort has correlated to a decline in daily active users, from around 152 million in the third quarter of last year to 132 million in the first quarter of this year — figures that prompted Roblox’s stock to tumble 18% in just one day — as its user base expresses frustration with the flurry of changes in recent months. Many players have lamented online that their experience is now diminished by a mishmash of locked chat functions, AI-generated chat summaries and newly age-gated games. In an interview at Roblox’s San Mateo headquarters, Jacobs said the company views these changes as “an investment in the long-term vision of Roblox.” That means pushing through the transition period while the community gets used to it, she said. “Not everyone is going to be happy all the time,” Jacobs said. “And I do think that the community loves Roblox so much and feels very personally attached, and so when we change something that is disruptive to them, I completely understand that.” The slew of safety updates comes as Roblox confronts growing legal scrutiny over the ability of predators to access young children on the platform. At least nine states have sued Roblox over child safety issues, with three additional states reaching settlements with the company in lieu of lawsuits. More than 150 families have also sued Roblox over its alleged failure to prevent children from being groomed or assaulted by predators on the platform. Their individual lawsuits are now consolidated into multidistrict litigation in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. “Roblox is deeply committed to fostering a safe, healthy, and age-appropriate environment for our community,” a Roblox spokesperson told NBC News. “The claims about Roblox fundamentally misrepresent how our platform works and fail to take into account the extensive, proactive measures we are pioneering and implementing to set a new standard in online safety.” But the company’s age verification measures have also been controversial, stirring questions about user privacy — Roblox says its third-party vendor, Persona, immediately deletes biometric data after age estimation — as well as inaccurate age estimations or work-arounds found by users hoping to trick the system. Age estimation tools have gained traction around the world as social platforms increasingly come under fire for failures to protect children, but they’ve also faced pushback from digital rights and free speech advocates who worry such measures will create new safety and privacy risks for internet users. Jacobs said Roblox’s AI-powered technology estimates ages based on facial structure and typically lands within 1.4 years of a child’s exact age. “We’re optimistic that it will continue to get better and better. But as compared to picking your birthday on a drop-down list, it’s much more accurate,” Jacobs said, adding that Roblox believes the era of self-declared age selections is over. “Ticking a box to say you’re 13 or older, it’s not enough anymore.” Roblox has also built various avenues for appeal for users who end up with inaccurate ages on their accounts, Jacobs said. Users whose ages were estimated to be younger than they are can provide their government IDs instead, she said, and their Roblox age will be updated to match their ID. Parents can also manually change the age on their kids’ linked accounts. And the company uses a system of “continuous age estimation” that’s constantly running in the background to monitor for possible discrepancies between the age on a user’s account and their “behavioral age.” The system takes in signals such as the time of day a user is playing, the kinds of games they’re playing and the language they’re using in chats — “the language of tweens can be very different than the language of an older generation,” Jacobs said — to determine if they should be asked to reverify their age. “Certainly no system is perfect, and we know that sometimes it will get it wrong,” Jacobs said. “We want to have a balance between being able to correct something that’s wrong, but also not letting people abuse the system.” Krista Carroll, a mom who brought her 12-year-old daughter to Roblox’s headquarters for the demonstration, said it can be overwhelming raising kids in a digital era and monitoring them online. Companies’ safety protections, she said, can alleviate some of that pressure. “I do like to hear that Roblox is taking it seriously, that there are more guardrails with privacy,” said Carroll. “Hopefully more businesses and more companies will use this as the model to say this is what we need to do to protect our kids.” But in its stated efforts to crack down on harmful content, some of Roblox’s recent changes have caused friction in its community of more than 24,500 game developers, many of whom are independent hobbyists. These are the users who have built tens of millions of games that anyone used to be able to create and publish, making oversight especially difficult. Last month, Roblox enacted new publishing requirements for developers that mandate ID verification, two-factor authentication and a financial deposit — either through having a paid Roblox subscription or paying a one-time publishing fee of 1,000 Robux (in-game currency) per game — to create games available to players under 16. We have a long-term vision of safety and civility on the platform that we’re building towards that we believe in. It’s OK if some people are not always happy about that. -Eliza Jacobs, Roblox’s vice president of safety product policy Roblox has touted these rules as an additional layer of vetting to make it harder for bad actors to spam the platform with rule-violating games. User-made games that feature sexual content, violence or other forms of banned content have often popped up on Roblox and can be difficult for moderators to catch. But the changes also prompted immediate uproar from users who say the platform is raising barriers of entry for small developers who can’t afford to pay for every game they make. Jacobs said the financial commitment is necessary for Roblox to ensure its developers are “invested” in the platform and its community. “We’re trying to build the appropriate friction to make sure that developers that are publishing to our community of millions of users are invested in that publishing and acting in good faith,” she said. She added that each game made available for Kids and Select accounts must also undergo a review process in which moderators observe live gameplay from players ages 16 and older to spot any safety concerns or policy violations. Jacobs said the company solicits community feedback through its Community Safety Council, a global group of Roblox creators who meet monthly to advise the company on safety measures, but she acknowledged that some changes will draw controversy regardless. “We have a long-term vision of safety and civility on the platform that we’re building towards that we believe in,” Jacobs said. “It’s OK if some people are not always happy about that.”