Roblox's Hard Fork Face-Check Fumble
Roblox CEO David Baszucki's Hard Fork interview could put us all at risk. On the surface, it looked like routine press hijinks, but if Roblox mishandles this next phase, the entire industry will pay for it.
Roblox is rolling out an age-verification system that uses a voluntary facial check to unlock chat features for users 13 and up. This is happening at the exact moment when political pressure around social media is rising (thanks Jonathan Haidt), and Roblox is drifting into the crosshairs.
Of course, reality is worthless. Roblox has built some of the most sophisticated trust-and-safety infrastructure in the industry. They've invested in detection tooling, moderation capacity, and AI-based monitoring. Do remember they host 100 MILLION DAU - bad actors exist everywhere, and at that scale, of course, some of them are going to be on the Roblox platform. The question is always on the margin: is Roblox relatively safer than alternatives? Unequivocally, the answer here is yes.
In a perfect world, this would be the moment when they translate all that capability into political credibility. Instead, that Hard Fork segment was the opposite. It was a Tour de France in what happens when you send a Silicon Valley-bubbled founder into the lion's den of journalists looking to skewer. The rest of the world doesn't speak that way, and ending every tweet with high-five gives me a level of cringe I haven't experienced since Katy Perry went to space. He tossed out lines like "it can help us make cool decisions" and threw sarcasm back at the interviewers ("Fun, let's keep going down this").
The press was always going to press. They aren't wrong to question Roblox, but they're doing it the way journalists approach every moral panic: creating a villain rather than context. Remember the Hot Coffee mod? Roblox is just the cartoon of the week. Yet State AGs, class actions, and a growing set of child-safety investigations are real, and the more heated the atmosphere gets, the more likely it becomes that games end up treated as the next version of social media.
Roblox's comms team should never have let that interview happen without serious prep. This was a stress test of how the company handles public scrutiny on its most politically sensitive issue. It didn't go well.
In politics, perception is reality. Regulators don't parse technical nuance or internal moderation investments. They look for a narrative, and right now the narrative is straightforward: kids, platforms, and predators. Once a story reaches that level of salience, the details may as well not exist.
Australia is already there! Starting Dec. 2025, platforms defined as "social media" must keep under-16s off their services or use age verification. The list includes TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc. The definitions aren't fixed, but gaming isn't on the list. But Roblox gets this wrong; we'll get swept into the next legislative cycle.