What is the role of tech journalism in a world where CEOs no longer feel shame?
I.
On Friday, the Hard Fork team published our interview with Roblox CEO David Baszucki. In the days since, it has become the most-discussed interview we've done in three years on the show. Listeners who wrote in to us said they were shocked to hear the leader of a platform with 151.5 million monthly users, most of them minors, express frustration and annoyance at being asked about the company's history of failures related to child safety. Journalists described the interview as "bizarre," "unhinged," and a "car crash."
And a case can be made that it was all of those things — even if Baszucki, in the studio afterwards and later on X, insisted to us that he had had a good time. In the moment, though, Baszucki's dismissive attitude toward discussing child safety struck me as something worse: familiar.
Baszucki, after all, is not the first CEO to have insisted to me that a platform's problems are smaller than I am making them out to be. Nor is he the first to blame the platform's enormous scale, or to try to change the subject. (He is the first tech CEO to suggest to me that maybe there should be prediction markets in video games for children, but that's another story.)
What people found noteworthy about our interview, I think, was the fresh evidence that our most successful tech CEOs really do think and talk this way. Given a chance to display empathy for the victims of crimes his platform enabled, or to convey regret about historical safety lapses, or even just to gesture at some sense of responsibility for the hundreds of millions of children who in various ways are depending on him, the CEO throws up his hands and asks: how long are you guys going to be going on about all this stuff?
Roblox is different from other social products in that it explicitly courts users as young as 5. (You are supposed to be at least 13 to use Instagram, TikTok, and other major platforms.) That has always put significant pressure on the company to develop serious safety features. The company says it spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on safety, and that 10 percent of its employees work on trust and safety issues. And trust and safety workers I know tell me that they respect Roblox's safety teams.
At the same time, this is a platform launched in 2006 where, for most of its history, adults could freely approach and message any minor unless their parents had dug into the app settings. Roblox did not verify users' ages, letting any child identify as 13 or older to bypass content restrictions. Filters intended to prevent inappropriate chat or the exchange of personal information were easily bypassed by slightly changing the spelling of words. Parental controls could be circumvented simply by a child creating a new account and declaring that they were at least 13.
Last year the company introduced new restrictions on chat. And this year, the company said it would deploy its own age estimation technology to determine users' ages and restrict the content available to them accordingly. This rollout was the main reason we had sought to interview Baszucki in the first place — something we had communicated to his team.
Which only made it stranger when Baszucki expressed surprise at our line of inquiry and threw his PR team under the bus. ("If our PR people said, “Let’s talk about age-gating for an hour,' I’m up for it, but I love your pod. I thought I came here to talk about everything,'" he said.)
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