Roblox pushes lawmakers to coordinate child safety across platforms

Roblox Corp. is urging federal lawmakers to take notice of what it sees as one of the most persistent threats to child safety online: kids abandoning tightly moderated platforms to communicate elsewhere.

Roblox's own content restrictions are driving users to less-regulated corners of the internet, according to Nicky Jackson Colaco, vice president of global public policy, and no single platform can address the problem.

"Kids are super creative," Jackson Colaco said during an April 13 media roundtable. "They will find ways to platform-hop."

The disclosure comes as Congress considers the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, a House Energy and Commerce Committee package that cleared markup in March and incorporates more than a dozen children's online safety bills. These include the Kids Online Safety Act, which contains algorithmic transparency requirements, and Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act 2.0.

The Senate unanimously passed COPPA 2.0 on March 5. Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) both signaled intent to move the legislation to conference during a March 4 Senate Commerce Committee executive session.

Spokespersons for Blackburn and the House Energy and Commerce committee did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Roblox's Jackson Colaco stopped short of requesting specific legislation around cross-platform data sharing, instead framing the ask as an awareness issue. She said Roblox already works with civil society groups to bring platforms to the table, but federal attention to the issue would accelerate progress.

Cross-platform challenges

Hardening individual platforms would not do enough to protect minors, according to Roblox. Matt Kaufman, the company's chief safety officer, said the dynamic is not theoretical. Nearly every serious safety incident the company identifies involves activity migrating to another platform because bad actors know Roblox monitors all communications and prohibits image and video sharing in chat, he said.

"Almost 100% of the time, anytime there is some kind of real safety challenge on Roblox for a particular user, it involves other platforms," Kaufman said. "The bad actors know this. This is not a secret."

Shoshana Weissmann, digital director and policy advisor at the Abundance Institute, said the behavior is a structural feature of the internet rather than a problem unique to any single platform.

"Bad actors will always try to move conversations to where there is less oversight and smaller chances an algorithm will disrupt their conversation," Weissmann said.

Distinct operations

On algorithmic transparency, Jackson Colaco said Roblox supports mandatory disclosure requirements under KOSA but argued the company operates differently enough from social media platforms that the provisions would apply to it in fundamentally distinct ways. Unlike social media companies, Roblox does not allow photo or video uploads, does not support link sharing and does not use infinite scroll or engagement-loop recommendation systems, she said.

"Many of the things that you can do across social media, you just can't do on Roblox," Jackson Colaco said.

The distinction matters for how KOSA's algorithmic accountability provisions would be implemented across an industry that encompasses both social media giants and gaming platforms with chat functions.

New safety structure

Roblox announced a new tiered account structure with Roblox Kids covering users ages five through eight and Roblox Select for users nine through 15. The system is built on an age verification process the company says covers more than half of its 144 million daily active users globally. Kaufman said there is a margin of error of roughly 1.4 years for users under 18, and that the company uses ongoing behavioral signals to recheck age estimates over time.

Verification relies on facial age estimation technology provided by Persona, and includes liveness detection checks to prevent spoofing. Users who decline to complete the process cannot communicate on the platform and are restricted to content available in the Roblox Kids tier.

Parents linking a child's account must verify their identity through either government ID or credit card, according to a Roblox spokesperson. Parents who want to access content intended for older users or communicate on the platform must also complete the age check process.

Mandatory age verification proposals often route users toward government ID submission as a backstop, Weissmann said, creating data security risks regardless of whether the primary verification method is biometric. Credit card verification as an alternative parental identity signal introduces a pathway with well-documented bypass potential.

Kaufman said 75% of what Roblox reports to the National Center For Missing & Exploited Children is flagged proactively by the company's algorithms, without any user report prompting the review. The company open-sourced a child endangerment detection algorithm, Sentinel, through a partnership with Robust Open Online Safety Tools last year.

Balancing protection and innovation

Jackson Colaco framed the new tiered accounts as a natural evolution enabled by improvements in age estimation technology rather than a response to external legal pressure, including ongoing litigation the company faces. She said the decision to proceed without waiting for regulatory mandates reflects a broader posture shift across the industry.

"We believe that the age where you could go in and tell a platform how old you are, that age is over," Jackson Colaco said. "The age where companies could fight regulation and spend all of their time fighting regulation is also over."

Roblox supports federal preemption of state children's online safety laws, with Jackson Colaco and Eliza Jacobs, vice president of safety product policy, saying a uniform national standard is operationally necessary because children move across state lines.

Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Ohio and Utah have passed laws prohibiting minors from opening social media accounts. About half of all US states have passed laws requiring websites with adult content to verify users are at least 18, often via government-issued ID.

Utah and Texas have pioneered laws requiring app stores to verify user ages and obtain parental consent for downloads, while California has passed legislation with a "default high privacy" setting for minors. New York has passed measures that would restrict social media platforms from using addictive algorithms to recommend content to minors.

Roblox reported that its daily active user count began declining sequentially in the fourth quarter of 2025, and engagement data tracked by S&P Global Market Intelligence Kagan suggests that trend may continue into the first quarter of this year.

Kagan analyst Neil Barbour flagged Roblox's late 2025 rollout of age verification requirements for chat features as a potential contributor, noting that the added friction to access communication tools could inhibit engagement across experiences.

"Roblox has created an enormously successful platform, but in the process, they've also created an enormous attack surface. To their credit, they've taken that threat seriously, but any serious effort to address it will likely compromise their near-term growth."

What's happening this week?

Below is a list of hearings, webinars and other tech, media and telecom-related events taking place virtually and in person in the nation's capital and beyond this week:

April 13-14

➤ Johns Hopkins Science Diplomacy Summit

April 14

➤ Stanford Tech Impact and Policy Center: The Impact of Cellphone Bans in Schools on Student Outcomes — Evidence from Florida

April 15

➤ Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation: An oversight hearing to examine the Federal Trade Commission

➤ House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade: Computing Power and Competition — Examining the Semiconductor Ecosystem

April 16

➤ House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party: China’s Campaign to Steal America’s AI Edge

➤ United States Patent and Trademark Office: Strategies for protecting and enforcing intellectual property in China — What Mid-Atlantic businesses need to know

April 17

➤ Georgetown Technology & National Security Conference