What is the role of tech journalism in a world where CEOs no longer feel shame?

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?

    • Glide@lemmy.ca
      9·
      8 hours ago

      It’s even worse than that.

      At it’s root, capitalism, as shown via Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” theory, infers that wealth equals virtue. To receive wealth is to have provided a benefit to society, and to be bereft of wealth is to contribute little while taking much. This system inadvertedly places a dollar value on the abuse of minors in Roblox: any suffering caused is of no consequence to the great good being provided to society, otherwise Roblox would go bankrupt.

      CEOs and corporations take the moral high ground because they live within a system that tells them that wealth is virtue, and they are overflowing in wealth. Until we accept that the core principals of capitalism are flawed, we will never begin holding bad actor’s appropriately accountable.

      • obsoleteacct@lemmy.zip
        6·
        6 hours ago

        It’s even worse than that.

        We are somewhere between 5 and 7 years into the problems with Roblox being well documented by everything from major media outlets to national governments. It’s well past the point of blaming nievete or ignorance.

        Parents are doing a cost benefit analysis and speculating that their kid won’t be one of the victims. They are paying to put their kids in harms way because they see the high liklihood of social isolation or temper tantrums to be a greater problem than risk posed by Nazis, and groomers.

  • xxce2AAb@feddit.dk
    14·
    10 hours ago

    In addition to the rampant pedophilia problems, did anybody else catch Baszucki talking about Polymarket integration? Yeah, let’s add gambling to the mix. /s

    I have no idea why any parent would let their kid anywhere near this dumpster fire.

  • Lime Buzz (fae/she)@beehaw.orgEnglish
    17·
    9 hours ago

    Yes. It’s a symptom of paedophile culture, which is based on patriarchy, toxic masculinity, racism, beauty standards, and rape culture etc.

    Edit: And that children are largely seen as property, or not people by a lot of ‘adults’, especially in the US as they never ratified the UN’s convention on the rights of the child.

    This isn’t the only way to help, but a big one would be giving children freedom, rights etc as laid out by the Youth Liberation movement. The more children are controlled and have no say, aren’t taught how to have boundaries and to consent or not, and don’t have those boundaries and (lack of) consent respected, and aren’t taught what sex is etc the more they will fall victims to these predators.

    Of course there is more that needs to be done, but it is a good start.

    Children are people, it’s time we started treating them like it.

    • SSUPII@sopuli.xyz
      6·
      10 hours ago

      While I agree with everything, I think this is more about fearing parents remove their children from the platform by knowing about the issue.

      What probably needs to happen is them receiving an actually global scandal.

      • Lime Buzz (fae/she)@beehaw.orgEnglish
        8·
        10 hours ago

        I think caregivers and children should definitely sit down and talk about it. Roblox is, for many reasons a predatory company. Just like most capitalists they don’t actually care about people, especially children. This has been shown not only in their lacklustre response to paedophiles, but also in their use of child labour to make them richer. Which they then do not compensate the children for fairly.

        Agreed, that might help, I really really want Roblox gone, or controlled by those that actual utilise it for it’s allegedly intended purpose. The youth do need places online where they can be safe until what I talked above is implemented, sadly it seems nothing commercial is actually the way to do it, given the repeated reports of poor mental health, predatory behaviour etc coming from so called ‘child spaces’ on commercial platforms.

  • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPM
    14·
    11 hours ago

    the interview in question, which opens with the following exchange:

    Newton: You have joined us today to talk about this new age-gating policy that Roblox is rolling out to protect kids. And I think we should start by just talking about the scope of the problem here. What has led you to this point? And how do you think of the problem of predators on Roblox?

    Baszucki: We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well. (emphasis mine) How do we allow young people to build, communicate and hang out together? How do we build the future of communication at the same time? So we, you know, we’ve been, I think in a good way, working on this ever since we started. And when we were — this was almost 18 or 19 years ago — when we first launched the company and we had just four of us sitting in a room, we were literally the moderators, like we would rotate all the time. And so fast-forward to where we are today, it’s just like every week, what is the latest tech? At the scale we’re at, 150 million daily actives, 11 billion hours a month, like what is the best way to keep pushing this forward? And as you correctly note, we’ve just started adding that we’re going to be using facial age estimation with A.I. to complement that.