The online gaming platform Roblox is adding new safety features aimed at protecting its young players. CEO and founder David Baszucki joins CBS News to explain the changes.

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Roblox, a leading online gaming platform popular among children and teens, is implementing new safety features to protect its users. CEO David Baszucki outlined the introduction of age-based communication controls, including a 'trusted connections' system that allows verified users to communicate more freely. The platform uses AI-based age estimation to ensure users are interacting safely and appropriately for their age group. 

Roblox continues to moderate all text, images, and voice communications with advanced AI systems, and is also offering new tools for parents and teens to monitor screen time, privacy, and spending. The company emphasizes a conservative approach to age verification and maintains human oversight alongside automated moderation to ensure user safety.

Roblox CEO unpacks platform's new safety features

If you're a parent of a kid or a teen, you've probably heard of Roblox. It's a wildly popular online gaming platform, giving kids and teens a place to connect while playing their favorite video games. Well, now the company is launching new safety features aimed at keeping them safe and giving parents some peace of mind. So let's bring in David Bozuki, the founder and CEO of Roblox. David, great to be with you. Can you tell us to me about the new features that you're rolling out? Hey, great to be here. We've been innovating on safety and civility for almost 20 years. Today, we're rolling out our vision, really, of age-based communication for everyone on our platform, under 13, teens, even older players. And there's a few key components of this. We're first introducing something called trusted connections. These are people you know and trust on Roblox. When you're a trusted connection, we're gonna allow you to actually chat more freely, and we're gonna make those trusted connections through AI-based age estimation. The reason we feel this is so important is we literally try to keep people on our platform, not just to grow and be a fun platform, but because we don't allow image sharing, we moderate all the text on the platform, we monitor text for critical harm. So we think this combination is actually gonna make Roblox really continue in our vision of trust and safety for not just younger people, but for teens as well. So how does the age verification system work? You mentioned you use AI. That's right. We've been pushing, really, the frontiers of AI for trust and safety for over four years now, and we're running over 200 AI models on Roblox, all images, all text, all voice on our platform, already goes through Roblox AI systems. For age estimation, if you and I were both 15, we could take out our phones, take a selfie, take a picture of ourselves, and in a privacy-compliant way, we get an age estimation, and we would then be able to become trusted connections. And when we were trusted connections, we may be able to speak a little bit more freely like we're used to on other text platforms. So how accurate is this technology? Because as you know, there's people who look a little bit older for their age, and there are people who look a little bit younger, especially in those growing years. Yeah, our age estimation technology is pretty accurate. I wanna highlight, we generally defer to the more conservative way. So unless we're pretty sure you should be a trusted connection, we're not gonna make it. That said, there will be other ways to make trusted connections and to assure your age as well. So what happens if someone, though, gets caught lying about their age? Well, first off, we're gonna be continuously monitoring ages on this. So we have a lot of backstops built into the system. But the other thing is, what I wanna highlight, we already filter all text and all voice on our system, and we do monitor for critical harm. So trusted connections is really a way to speak more freely on the platform. We're also introducing other things to help with really goodwill and health, and that includes, for example, in the teen area, where we're starting to offer really things around screen time, more privacy, more notifications. And we're also allowing teens and parents as well to form a connection and allow parents who with their teen may wanna monitor spending or trusted connections as well. So it's really our whole vision of the future of safety and civility. We do believe, though, that age estimation and trusted connections is gonna become really the gold standard for teen communication. Yeah, and you talk a lot about how Roblox is a place for people to connect. And a lot of those connections, a lot of the communication happens in those chat rooms. So in those particular chat rooms, are there human moderators there to make sure that those conversations are safe? Every, the volume of what's happening on Roblox is absolutely enormous, right? We had a weekend, two weekends ago, where there were over 30 million people on Roblox all at the same time. Every piece of text, every voice communication goes through very sophisticated AI filters. AI filters that are getting so good that we've open sourced, for example, our voice filter. It's being used by a consortium called the Roos Consortium to open source it for other companies to use. So the scale is so big, it can't all be human, but we do couple human with all of the great AI technology we have. Big thanks to CEO of Roblox there for talking to us today.

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