Roblox is still trying to convince lawmakers it’s not social media

As the new Congress has already started working on legislation to protect kids from social media harms, Roblox is doubling down on its efforts to convince lawmakers it shouldn’t be lumped in with products like Instagram and YouTube.

Even though the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) failed to become law last year, despite passing handily in the Senate, protecting kids from social media still seems to be one of the few issues that unites many Democrats and Republicans. It’s not yet totally clear what kind of legislation will be viable this year or what role (if any) the Trump administration will try to play. But last week, the Senate Commerce Committee advanced the Kids Off Social Media Act (KOSMA), a bipartisan bill that would bar kids under 13 from making social media accounts and restrict platforms from implementing recommendation algorithms for kids under 17.

Most mainstream social media platforms say they don’t make their services available to kids under the age of 13. But Roblox is one of the few large internet platform companies that openly hosts young people on its services, which it promotes as a good place for kids to learn technical and social skills. Roblox is an online gaming platform that lets users play across all different kinds of interactive experiences and enables them to build their own that others can interact with. It currently boasts 85 million daily active users, and as of the end of 2023, 42 percent of its user base was under the age of 13, according to Statista. At a briefing with reporters in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, Roblox US public policy head Emma Morris did not directly comment on whether KOSMA would cover the company. But, she says, Roblox has spoken with the bill’s sponsors about how the platform is distinct from social media, even though, in general, she acknowledged, it can be tricky to write carveouts that don’t undermine lawmakers’ goals.

Roblox has become more proactive in engaging legislatures, just as it seems some state lawmakers are beginning to view the company as a potential target for legislation. New York State Sen. Andrew Gounardes (D) introduced the New York Children’s Online Safety Act (NYCOSA) after parents reacted to his earlier kids safety bills by asking whether they applied to Roblox. Unlike those earlier laws, NYCOSA was crafted so that it would. For Roblox, that could pose a challenge. Like most companies, it finds a patchwork of state laws can be arduous to keep up with, yet Congress has been slow to act while states forge ahead. Differing state tech regulations have already resulted in a widening spectrum of user experiences on the internet. In Texas, a law seeking to age-gate porn with age verification — currently under review by the Supreme Court — led Pornhub to shut down in the state entirely.

“From a regulatory perspective, the world is getting more and more complicated, and Roblox is really trying to make a concerted effort to reach out to policymakers and be part of the conversation,” Roblox chief safety officer Matt Kaufman told reporters at the DC briefing. Kaufman calls Roblox “fundamentally really different” from social media, in part because it was created with the expectation that kids would use it and safety is built into the process of designing new features. That’s a principle that KOSA aimed to instill for tech platforms — and while Roblox didn’t go so far as to endorse that bill, it did support the California Age-Appropriate Design Code, which has so far been partially blocked by the courts.

The other thing that sets Roblox apart, Kaufman says, is that it doesn’t have the same “engagement loops” of posting, commenting, and scrolling like on social media. Instead, he says, Roblox users hang out with friends and family on the platform in real time. “It’s not that different than going to the park and playing with your friends,” he says. Beyond being a social outlet, Kaufman says, Roblox has some real educational value. He says it can be important “developmentally” because users can learn STEM skills by coding experiences and learning how to collaborate with others in games.

It’s not yet clear how much lawmakers will buy this argument. After all, social media executives make some of the same points about their platforms being hubs for connection, positivity, and learning. Plus, it wasn’t that long ago that age-gating video games was a focus of Congress, and medical experts still warn of the risks of too much screen time for kids. Gounardes, the New York State lawmaker who introduced a bill with the intention of covering Roblox, was convinced by parent constituents that it was worth including the platform in his legislation that seeks to prevent strangers from contacting kids in online spaces.

Last year, Roblox introduced a host of new policies it hoped would make its service even safer for young kids. Those included upping parental controls, restricting users under 13 from accessing “social hangout” spaces, and messaging other users outside of games. Earlier in the year, Bloomberg published an investigation into Roblox that revealed how adults accused of abducting or abusing kids allegedly groomed them on the platform. At the press briefing on Wednesday, Kaufman addressed Roblox’s approach to safety generally, saying that “anything that ever puts anybody at real risk on the platform is one too many situations.” While the company has automated and human moderation systems, Kaufman says that when something does go wrong, they also have investigators who search for the fault points and figure out how to strengthen them.

Roblox is also distinct from social media companies in the sorts of protections it provides to protect younger users and teens alike, according to Kaufman. “Our approach is it doesn’t matter how old you say you are, when you come to Roblox, we are going to keep you safe. And that means some things that we do very differently than other platforms,” he says. That includes barring users from sharing images, not offering encrypted communications and instead actively monitoring communications, and reporting issues to law enforcement. “We’re trying to go the extra mile there and really operate differently than I think some of the other large platforms out there are.”