Fourteen-year-old Carolina has been on Roblox since she was 10, chatting and playing with other gamers on the platform. When the site rolled out mandatory age checks at the start of the year, Carolina was afraid she would lose access to some of her friends and group chats. She needn’t have worried — the software determined she was 16 or 17.
“Without any makeup, I did what the app asked: turned my head this way and that for the photo,” Carolina, who lives in São Paulo, told Rest of World. “The app said I was 16 to 17 years old. I was able to go back to my chats.”
Roblox is among the growing number of social media platforms installing age checks as governments around the world act to keep young users off social media sites and limit their access to content deemed inappropriate. The most commonly used methods include verification with a government-issued identity; estimation through biometrics such as facial recognition; and inferring the age of the user from their online behavior.
The methods are not foolproof. Facial recognition technology is known to be less accurate for women and people of color. On Roblox, the age check is meant to restrict who users can chat with. The 16 to 17 age group, which Carolina was assessed as belonging to, can chat with users in their group, as well as the ones immediately above and below theirs, or those in the 13–15 and 18–20 age groups. Being able to chat with older users exposes her to the risk of harassment and abuse — something California-based Roblox has come under scrutiny for. Of its more than 100 million daily users, nearly 40% are under the age of 13, some estimates show.
