Faced with mounting lawsuits over
alleged child safety failures, popular virtual gaming platform Roblox has announced its effort to safeguard its chat
feature using an automated rephrasing feature.
Described in a company statement as an “AI-powered feature designed to keep gameplay fluid while maintaining civility within chat,”
Roblox's new feature forgoes filtering profanity with hashmarks (ex. ####) for automated rephrasing.
For example, “Hurry TF up!” will no longer be edited with “####” and
instead be changed to a profanity-free “Hurry up!”
When a message violates Roblox's profanity policy all users involved in the chat are notified about the rephrasing, which
is currently available in all languages supported by the company's automatic translation tools.
In addition, Roblox's statement explains that the
company is in the process of making more improvements to its text filtering system in order to detect more variations of language that breaks its community standards.
advertisement
advertisement
By training its systems to
better detect language in which letters are replaced with numbers or symbols, the company claims that the prevalence of false negatives for sharing or soliciting social handles and phone numbers have
been reduced by 20 times.
This last point alludes to the most damning criticisms against Roblox. While prioritizing chat-based civility among users is a worthwhile goal, backlash against
Roblox's chat feature is not centered around profanity as much as child exploitation, especially with regard to child predators posing as younger users.
As
“the largest dedicated gaming platform for users aged 13 and under” in the world -- according to its latest shareholder letter -- Roblox's real-time messaging feature and its alleged lack
of child safety precautions has become the focal point of hundreds of child exploitation lawsuits.
More than 130 individual lawsuits have joined the multi-district group litigation in the U.S.
District Court for the Northern District of California, representing the cases of children who have been allegedly groomed by predators on Roblox, lured from their homes and assaulted.
Roblox-related cases in the U.S. have already resulted in the arrest of dozens of people on charges of abducting or sexually assaulting children they met on the virtual gaming platform.
To
help appease ongoing backlash, Roblox rolled out a global AI-powered age-verification system in January designed to better protect underage users by mandating identification checks in order to access the chat feature.
However, the company's rollout amassed immediate
criticism, with some users reporting placement in an incorrect age category, while others were able to easily trick the system into thinking they were older than they are.
In response, RobloxChief Safety Officer Matt Kaufman stated that “it's a process that will take time.”