From next month it will start enforcing facial age estimation to allow children to chat with strangers only if they are in their broad age group.
Roblox compared its new system to school cohorts such as elementary, middle school and high school. It will be introduced first in Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, where children will be blocked from privately chatting with adults they do not know in real life from next month, and in the rest of the world in early January.
Users will be placed into the following groups: under nine, nine to 12, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, 18 to 20, or 21 and over. Children will be able to chat only with others in their age group and similar ones. For example, a child with an estimated age of 12 will be able to chat only with under-16s. Images and video used for the checks would not be stored, Roblox said.
Them having an office large enough to moderate in-game communications, on every popular language? They have some billions to spare. Serving kids requires a lot of work they have neglected for a very long time.
Facebook was a vehicle for hateful, genocidal messages in Myanmar, and they seemingly got of the hook having no person understanding local language on the market they occupied.
If Roblox primarily targets kids, they can’t go without agressive moderation, psy-help on demand, things one would find obvious, but these are never required, not to say it’s not that sexy as getting profits and cutting corners.
I don’t know if their business model would be viable if they started things right from the beginning, but it would be more stressful to them to finally start doing something about that.