How Parents and Kids Are Dealing With Roblox's Messy New Age Requirements

If you can put on an "adult face" and trick Roblox's AI, is it really doing much? It depends.

The last place I expected to field questions about Roblox parental controls was as my chest was about to explode during one of the most important football game of my life.

There was a moment in this past week’s heart attack-inducing Bears victory over the Packers where things looked bleak. The game had not gone Chicago’s way, and everyone in the room was looking for a reason to talk about anything but the football game on TV. It was the biggest game of the year and yet, we wanted distractions.

This was a gathering where three families brought their kids. Six adults downstairs, six kids upstairs. Screen time is off. Chaos reigns. Leave the parents alone in the basement, and only bother them if you want to celebrate—or someone’s gotten hurt.

In that moment, one of the parents turned and asked “Do you know why my kid can’t talk to their friend in Roblox anymore?” That’s when it dawned on me that Roblox recently flipped on new restrictions on chat, where players either have an account where parental controls are granting permission to chat, or the platform is snapping a selfie that’s run through its secret AI sauce to “determine” if they’re 13 years old.

(Judging age from a photo always makes me laugh; I’m nearly 41 years old, still get carded at every opportunity available, and people are shocked I’m a parent of two.)

It also made me realize there are probably many parents who haven’t even realized Roblox is a game where you should be closely monitoring the parental controls, and the recent chat restrictions are the first time their kid is encountering the kind of friction that’s prompting that a conversation—or Google search. You can place some of that blame on parents, of course, but I place far more on Roblox. As I wrote about last week, Roblox purposely reduces the friction necessary for children to join the service by not requiring an email, phone number, or other way to register an account.

Here’s how I put it:

“Most platforms have these basic checks in place, whether it’s an email address or a phone number. One alternative is asking for a parent to submit one or the other, which would loop a parent into the conversation about installing Roblox to start. These steps, of course, would reduce the amount of accounts on Roblox. It would, of course, reduce the amount of users the company could promote are using Roblox. Do you see the problem?”

Roblox wants you to join. The friction comes once you’re already on Roblox.

“My wife has a much younger sister who’s 13, who my wife helped raise,” said one parent, who asked to remain anonymous. “I never saw her even bother to use chat until very recently, as she’s now super into Adopt Me and uses chat for trading. She’s mildly annoyed about the chat blocking, but it was also pretty trivial for her to get around it.”

(Adopt Me is a role-playing game that started as a world where children can simulate being parents and children, before adding virtual pets that can be raised and traded between players. Adopt Me is so successful that McDonalds made Happy Meal toys!)

“I think she still has no interest in using chat for social reasons, so she’s only annoyed about how it impacts trading,” added the parent. “She does get a little bit of an ‘I don’t want to play with little kids’ attitude when she encounters someone in game who doesn’t have chat though, so it feels almost like it’s creating social stigma, as well.”

Huh.

The 13-year-old in question apparently did her best “adult face” while Roblox snapped a selfie, which the platform interpreted as her being 16 years old. (This distinction is important because having a selfie say you’re over 13 gives access to chat, and the way Roblox works now is that what age Roblox thinks you are determines who you talk to.)

This situation is not unique, either. WIRED reported on some of the chaos caused by the changes, including “age-verified accounts for minors as young as 9 years old on eBay for as little as $4.” While eBay took the listings down, the concern here is not children buying chat-verified accounts on eBay, it’s adults buying accounts that would allow them to speak with minors. Such an account pools you specifically with minors.

Adults are also using their faces to chat-verify kids. I joked about this option to my friend, but they didn’t do it. I’m not surprised parents are confused at what’s going on, and thus doing what they need to do for their kids to go back to what they were doing.

“We are aware of instances where parents age check on behalf of their children leading to kids being aged to 21+,” the company said in a statement to WIRED. “We are working on solutions to address this and we’ll share more here soon.”

This video, from a Roblox superman’s perspective, is worth watching in full:

On one hand, Gwamgo is right that Roblox probably rolled out these changes as soon as possible, flaws and all, in response to ongoing pressure on the platform. On the other hand, I’m far less sympathetic to complaints about traffic dropping to various Roblox games or some percentage of the Roblox user base deciding to just avoid chat entirely. Any meaningful changes to Roblox that make it a safer place were going to impact the bottom line of the platform and the creators who are using it. A young person who does not use chat is, in theory, less likely to be targeted by a predator.

This is what happens when you cram complicated safety measures in after the fact.

My own kids didn’t notice anything. For one, my five-year-old can’t even read yet. With my nine-year-old, I’ve got chat turned off using the parental controls. I have to give her some credit, though, because she was playing a role-playing game this week and I saw her using a sign item in the game to “chat” with another player. I let it slide.

Clever kid! You can see an example below:

“I don’t think my kid has noticed because she only plays Roblox while being on a group WhatsApp call with her friends, so they talk to each other instead of using the chat,” said Beth Boisvert, a mom to an eight-year-old daughter. “But I also know she’s complained about the chat being ‘distracting’ before so it’s probably been a positive overall.”

Beth said her daughter’s friends came up with the WhatsApp group a few years ago. They’ll chat after school or engage in “parallel play,” yapping while playing in Roblox.

This played out similarly for Joel DeWitte, a father to two sons, ages 11 and 13.

“My kids don’t mess with in-app chat, only through FaceTime or calls with people they actually know,” said Joel. “I don’t have [chat] explicitly turned off, I’ve just stressed the importance of not chatting with strangers and pushed them toward playing with People they know. They are too plugged into screens (aren’t we all?), but we’ve done our best to at least encourage play with friends in virtual spaces.”

One way for your children do not notice, obviously, is saying “no” to Roblox.

“I actually didn’t want to be the dad that banned it outright because my parents were like that when I wanted to play GTA 3 [Grand Theft Auto III],” said Chris, father to a 10-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son. “They are in the prime demographic for a lot of the games in Roblox and a lot of their friends at school were having playdates in different Roblox games.”

Chris tried Roblox. He installed it on devices for everyone and played together. But Chris felt uncomfortable how chat-focused it was (true!), and how often he witnessed “strangers attempting to chat with them without any way to prevent unsolicited chats.”

When asked, Chris couldn’t remember if the option to disable chat wasn’t there (unlikely) or the parental controls were too confusing (more likely). Generally, parental control UIs are a labyrinth, with descriptions that sound like a lawyer wrote them.

“I ultimately just felt like there weren’t enough ways to protect them online if I couldn’t play with them, so we banned it in our house,” said Chris, who said his kids pivoted to Fortnite and Minecraft. “They were upset at first but it didn’t really impact their enjoyment of other games.”

I dislike the newly widespread practice of requiring identification to access increasingly core parts of the internet experience. It’s a policy failure. It has obvious harms. But I cannot deny that Roblox using this blunt object is probably a net positive for safety. Making a lack of chat a social stigma—either due to a lack of parental controls or because you’re judged as too young—is a useful pressure. It’s not hard to imagine a child having a conversation with a parent as a result of that. Useful tension.

But the idea that people can make an, uh, “adult face” and bypass the restrictions? And people could buy accounts that let them purposely pool into chats with minors?

Woof.

Have a story idea? Want to share a tip? Got a funny parenting story? Drop Patrick an email.

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Also:

• Roblox was damned if you do, damned if you don’t with this. You had to make changes that were flawed, because you put yourself in a hole in the first place.

• Roblox is relying on a flawed AI model to analyze selfies because they chose scale over safety for the past decade. No human moderation could keep up.

• OK, I take that back. Any human moderation that could keep up with be extremely costly, take a long time, and meaningfully impact Roblox’s scale.