In this week’s podcast episode, ConnectSafely CEO Larry Magid sits down with Tami Bhaumik, Vice President of Civility at Roblox, to explore how one of the world’s largest online platforms is fostering safer and more positive digital spaces.
In the conversation, Tami shares the origins of Roblox’s Civility Initiative, a program designed to promote responsible online interactions through education, policy and cutting-edge technology. She dives into Roblox’s comprehensive safety strategy, including evolving moderation tools powered by AI and parental controls that empower families to create safer online experiences.
Parents, take note — Tami introduces several new Roblox parental tools, including:
- Remote account management for easier oversight.
- Daily screen time limits to promote healthy usage.
- Communication restrictions for users under 13.
- Content maturity settings to customize what kids see.
But it’s more than just tools — it’s about starting a conversation. Tami emphasizes the importance of parental engagement and encourages parents to jump into the game with their kids:
“The first tip I always give is to get in the game,” Tami said. “It would be so easy to have your child teach you how to play Roblox, and it is so much fun. Once you get in there, you start having conversations, you find commonalities, and you understand why they love it so much.”
Listen to their conversation below or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Listen to “Inside Roblox's Mission to Make Gaming Safer” on Spreaker.Transcript
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Larry: It’s always fun for me to talk to Tami Bhaumik. She happens to be the vice president of civility at Roblox, but she’s also a friend who I’ve known for many years, even before I was at Connect Safely and she was at Roblox, but Now we intersect through internet safety and civility. So Tami, let’s start by you telling me why you have the title you have.
I mean, there aren’t that many vice presidents of civility. In the tech world, usually it’s something like, I don’t know, COO or chief financial officer or something boring, but you actually have something useful.
Tami: I think it is. And as far as I know, I am the only vice president of civility at any company that I know of.
And it is something that I hold near and dear to my heart. I am so grateful. to Roblox for focusing on a very key important area, which is not only to remain safe online, but also to make sure that everyone on Roblox is having civil, optimistic, positive experiences on Roblox.
Larry: So I want to get to that in a minute.
But I also want to get a little bit about your background so people could have sensed that you didn’t just fall off the turnip truck last week.
Tami: I’ve been around for a long time. So truth be told I was VP of global marketing for a number of years here.
roadblocks, but I started the civility initiative about six years ago, which I’ll get into in a little bit more as we go into exactly what that what my focus is and what my focus is. But prior to that, I have always been in marketing focused on tech companies and launching new, innovative product features into the world.
Larry: And now you’re selling civility. You’re in marketing. You’re just marketing something beyond just making profits for your employers.
Tami: We are. And, you go back to it and really it is just good business. I mean, if we can create a platform and a product that people enjoy, that they have fun. That’s fun and they’re able to create and innovate. That’s a good thing. If we do it in a way that’s safe and civil, it makes people want to stay. So you want to, related to business terms, it increases engagement. Retention and word of mouth. So from a business standpoint, it’s just good business to have a safe and civil platform.
Larry: And I know I don’t, I’m not, I never quite understand how advertising plays a role in your business, but I do know that in companies that have advertisers, it’s very important to the advertisers. They don’t want their pitches to be around toxic content. It’s not good for their businesses. So it’s
Tami: definitely so this is just good business and making sure that we’re constantly innovating on the safety and civility front so that we can, you know, and
our work is never done in terms of safety. Safety is an area that continues to evolve, that continues to get better with the use of A. I. And different product features that are out there. We can really create. An environment that truly is, I believe, safer and more civil than the real world.
Larry: Well, first of all, what is civility? Why don’t you define it for us? I mean, I think I understand what it is, but I think that you could define it in different ways.
Tami: So, what we mean by civility, it was the Civility Initiative was born six years ago out of conversations with parents who didn’t know anything.
About Roblox. They didn’t know what their kids were doing online. You know, aside from just on Roblox and the education gap between young people and their parents was so wide. And so the civility initiative is all about closing the education gap between the generations. And we do that in a lot of different ways, primarily three.
One is we partner with global safety organizations and like Connect Safely, like the digital wellness lab in Boston associated with Harvard Medical that focuses on child developmental health. We work with universities from around the world and safety NGOs to ensure that we have the latest and greatest updated evidence based data to inform our education materials that we’re focused on to educate our community.
The other areas we are again, engaging in conferences and roundtables and really advocating both externally and internally to make sure we’re continuing to evolve our products in ways that make it safer and more civil. And then the last pillar is really about research. We want to make sure that we have evidence based, reliable, materials that reinforce the education materials that we’re creating for our community.
Larry: And how important is education and where does it play a role and, you know, what are its limitations? I mean, obviously everything has advantages and some limitations.
Tami: You know, education is everything. I think that in order to help our community to thrive, Roblox, but, Gen Z’s and Gen Alphas. If we are going to help provide them with the tools necessary to thrive in the digital world, whatever the next digital world looks like, whatever this internet 3.
looks like, we need to make sure that we’re giving them the agency to make decisions for how they interact with the Internet, how they interact with Roblox to get relevant feedback from young people themselves in order to build a relevant product that they’re going to use. And enjoy. Mm-Hmm, . So, I think that education is everything as far as parents are concerned.
I know that there’s this big wave that parents have right now. They don’t know what’s going on, so their inclination is to pull back and to not put devices in, in their kids’ hands to take it away, to reduce exposure. To the screen. I think that we are doing young people a huge disservice. I think by taking away those devices, we’re taking away their learning.
Our job as adults, caregivers and parents, is to put the devices in our children’s hands. And teach them how to use it. So, the focus of my team is developing materials and education. Gives parents guidance on how to do that.
Larry: And one, point I would make, sort of expanding on what you just said, is whether we put the devices in their hands or not, at some point in their lives, They are going to get those devices certainly by the time they’re adults, but probably before that, and I’ve often thought of many of these products are certainly Roblox among them as training wheels for life as ways in which, you know, people talk about the dangers.
And yes, bad things can happen on digital platforms. But the reality is compared to things that can happen in cars compared to things that can happen elsewhere, For the most part, for the vast majority of people, the bad things that could happen are things that are, that are manageable and not, life threatening.
I mean, I’m going to talk in a minute about those rare occasions. When something horrendous happens, I think it’s important to point out that we all have to deal with issues like bullying and civility and managing our reputation and our well being not overdoing things. I mean that’s life That’s something that everybody deals with and tragically some people have to deal with more severe problems but I think it’s important to kind of understand what affects the vast majority of users and then Make sure we’re protecting the vulnerable among us who unfortunately have some severe issues which do come up now and then.
Tami: I completely agree with you.
Larry: And as long as I, as long as I bring that up, I do want to get to the elephant in the room. We have seen press reports of some really bad things happening on Roblox and other platforms, not just Roblox. We know that, unfortunately, we live in a world where, though most people are really nice, there are people who do not have the best interest of children in mind, and in fact, will exploit children for a variety of reasons, including their own gratification.
So talk a little bit about how real that threat is. And how Roblox deals with it.
Tami: Yeah. So thank you for bringing that up. Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Recently, there have been some reports by a short seller, which obviously has the intention to lower our stock price by putting information out there that misrepresents and mischaracterizes Roblox.
Roblox has been around for almost 20 years now. We started out with young people on the platform with Children on the platform. So safety has always been our number one priority. It is what drives us here as a company. It’s what drives us here. I can point out that 10 percent of our full-time employees focus 100 percent of their time focused on safety, developing innovative features, constantly updating our policies. And I can honestly say that a hundred percent of our entire employee base does something in relation to safety. So, from the very, very beginnings we have focused and made. Safety a priority.
It is one of our core tenets. We have different moderation tools from thousands of human moderators to artificial intelligence that helps us to make sure that every piece of content is reviewed. Anything that is policy violating it’s swiftly removed.
We also have policies that are constantly being updated each and every day to adjust and flex with the new things that come in that we continue to focus on. I think that a lot of the PR pointed out incidents that happened a couple of years ago and that were already dealt with and resolved again, focusing on our evolution moving forward.
From an innovation standpoint, our work’s never done when it comes to safety. There is no such thing as perfection. It is something that is constant.
Larry: And by the way, that’s true in every aspect of life. I’m drinking water right now. There are people who’ve died from drinking too much water. It’s hard to imagine, but it actually has happened.
And I can’t think of anything that’s useful that doesn’t have some risk associated with it.
Tami: Yes. Obviously any incident. Is unacceptable as far as we’re concerned. That said, it’s what really drives us. I mean, we would love to be able to get to 100 percent safety. And really, honestly, that is our goal, is to make Roblox the safest platform on the internet.
Larry: If you were at 100 percent safety, you’d be safer than a bed. Safer. No, seriously, you really would be. I mean, people have fallen out of bed. I mean, any, that is a lofty goal for us to hold a digital platform to a higher standard than we would, hold our kitchen, our dining room, our living room. I’m not saying we shouldn’t hold you to a high standard.
We should. But we should understand that all things in life have some risk associated with it.
Tami: Yeah, you know, just to put it in context, we have close to 90 million daily active users on the platform. I just want to put that in context.
Now, again, going back to one bad incident is too many. But in context with 90 million daily active users, if you think about it, we’re larger than some countries. And so, when it comes to safety, it is constantly evolving.
Larry: Having said that, let’s talk a little bit about what parents can do, you know, so there is this somewhat trite but still true statement. It takes a village to raise a child. And in this case, I think of the village as an industry, Roblox, as a government, which creates hopefully sensible regulations of educators, of non profits like Connect Safely, of the children themselves and then, of course, of the parents. So let’s talk about that villager known as mom or dad or caretaker and talk about their role. In helping keep their child safe and for that matter, we can segue into civility as well, keep them safe and civil while they’re using platforms like Roblox.
Tami: Going back to who, who’s responsible, I think we’re all responsible. I think it’s industry’s responsibility. I think it’s regulators, government regulators’ responsibility to enact evidence based, thoughtful, balanced regulation, and then it’s up to parents as well because parents know their Children best.
They know the maturity levels of their Children. They know what their Children are ready for and what they may not be ready for. So I think that it’s a responsibility. All it’s three legs of a stool. Right. In order to create that success when it comes to helping our kids to thrive. And so when it comes to industry, we are announcing updates. to our parental controls that I’m so excited about.
Larry: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that, but go ahead and answer that question.
Tami: Can I do the big reveal? Can I do the big reveal? So we are announcing five new features for our parental controls. Ultimately, our goal is to make it easier for parents and caregivers to give them control.
And clarity on what their kids are doing on Roblox. So the first feature that we’re rolling out is remote management. And what that means is that parents can now create an account and link directly to their child’s Roblox account and be able to get access once they’ve verified that the parent through government ID, they can then get access to a dashboard that provides them visibility.
into all of these different settings and controls that they have, that they can adjust. The first one on this dashboard is they can easily see who their kids are friends with. So they have greater visibility into their friendship list. The third feature that we’re announcing Is daily screen time limits.
So as a parent, you can decide what is right for your family. We are allowing parents to set in 15 minute increments, daily screen time limits. They’re, it’s more granular controls that you’re. able to set and you can change it daily. So if your child has done well on a test or has finished their chores, you can increase those limits.
You may want to add an additional 30 minutes. So that has been a really important thing for parents to be able to monitor the amount of screen time. There’s been so much, as you well know, so much conversation in terms of screen time. The additional feature that we’re rolling out that we’re very, very excited about that I think parents are going to be very excited about is built in restrictions for communications.
And what this means is over the next few months, we’re adding new limitations and parental controls about how, around how Children under the age of 13 can communicate with others. So remember, we will always have filters. In terms of moderation, no matter what the age, but for our youngest users, we’re really making sure that those under 13 will no longer be able to directly message others on Roblox outside of games or experiences.
And. Those under the age of 13 from a broadcast public broadcast message in game all of the defaults will be set to off. So by default, users younger than 13 will not be able to directly message others.
Larry: Now, can parents modify that?
Tami: Yes. So parents can change this setting in the parental controls.
But if a child tries to change it will trigger a message to the parents requiring parental consent. So that’s a huge one that I think that a lot of parents will be very, very excited about. The final new feature that we’re announcing is content maturity settings.
And as you know, every child is different. Every child has a different maturity level. What’s right for one nine year old may not be appropriate for another nine year old. So we’re coming out with different content labels. Minimal, mild, moderate, and restricted. Those four new content labels. And for our youngest users, it will be defaulted to mild.
Restricted content is for 17 plus and requires government issued I. D. In order to get access to any restricted content. So that is something brand new that we are offering. And then , we have already had control spend limits. We’ve had that for a while now, but we’re moving that control spending limit directly into the dashboard. So parents now have access to all of that information in one single place.
Larry: These are the Robux that people can buy to enhance their games.
Tami: That’s right. That’s right. So if they want to, you know, set a limit in terms of how much is being spent, they have that choice of doing that.
Larry: And then you mentioned communicating outside of gaming. So talk to me about the difference between direct messaging and whatever chatter might go on within a game itself.
Tami: So we have two types of chat. One that is in platform. So it’s called platform chat on Roblox And we are shutting off. We will be shutting off any ability for Users under the age of 13 to message others on that chat now in game We do have public chat and then one on one chat. The public chat is required. It’s actually part of the roadblocks experience. For example, if you’re playing some sort of soccer game or some strategic game where you have to communicate with others to figure out, capture the flag. Who’s going to capture the flag?
You run here, run there. You have to have that ability to chat. So again, we have always had filters on. It is a public venue where the chat is seen by all. We have report ability, report abuse ability, and that is monitored that’s moderated on that front. The direct chat is always, it’s defaulted to off for those under the age of 13.
So nobody can directly message and you and a child cannot directly message somebody in the game. Unless parents approve it.
Larry: And it’s also important to point out that just public chat, as you saw it is, and you may not only the interval, the game, but it’s also integral to the development of a child to be able to be expressive and to be able to communicate with others in a way that’s safe.
And in this case, because it is public, you, I presume, and moderated and monitored and filtered, right. Et cetera. You’ve taken several precautions.
Tami: It is, and that is the way they learn from one another. The feedback that I’ve gotten from so many Gen Z Roblox users is that they have so much fun on Roblox.
They have met some really great friends and they’ve learned about other areas of the world. In terms of how they live in different cultures, there’s so much richness to the engagement.
Larry: And do you have to be a kid to use Roblox?
Or could the parents go out and find some games that they might enjoy?
Tami: Absolutely not. I think that a lot of my Adult friends are playing Roblox now. And my favorite game right now is dress to impress. And it is a runway.
Larry: If this were a video podcast, you would see she’s impeccably dressed, I mean, you must have spent hours in wardrobe and makeup before we did this interview.
Tami: I know. It should have been a webinar. What happened?
Larry: Absolutely. Anyway, I’m sorry. I divert. Tell me more about this game that you’re playing.
Tami: No, this dress to impress is just so fun. I think it’s good for any age. , you wander around and you have. Like something like, I think it’s three minutes to dress in a full outfit given a theme and you end up going out on runway and people vote and I’m not very good. Someday we’ll go in and play dress to impress together.
Larry: Great. And I’ll, then I’ll just need access to a credit card. So I can go out and buy all that clothing that I’m virtually trying on.
So here’s a question on parental controls: how do you make sure that the parents have visibility and control, but at the same time, the child has some level of privacy. So the parents aren’t micromanaging to the point where the child feels smothered by their parents.
I mean, how do you manage that?
Tami: It is really hard. I think that Again, it’s important for us, for our youngest players on Roblox, in order to give parents the confidence to understand what their kids are doing, again, that control and clarity for our younger users. Now, as Roblox players age up, and they start moving into the teenage years, this is where a lot of the civility education materials that my team creates with the leaders from around the world like you, we’ve created some materials where we can give teenage the ability instead of co-partner with them and help guide. Because you’re right, we, you know, if you’re 15 or 16, the last thing you want mom and dad to do is hover, hover, hover, and be able to control everything we feel. I think that it’s important for teenagers and I think developmental psychologists would agree. I know that we work with the digital wellness lab Dr. Michael Rich. He agrees that by the time you reach. your teenage years, having autonomy, having agency is such a healthy part of growing up.
Larry: Yeah. Well even going back to when I was a teenager, my parents would know if I was going out in the car with a friend when I’m 16, they would know who I was with and they might know where I was going, but there wasn’t a tape recorder in the backseat recording our conversation.
So there’s a certain amount of privacy that the young people, especially teenagers, need for part of their development. And parents obviously need the assurance that their teens are not putting themselves into danger as well.
Tami: Yeah often I get asked, right, what are, what are my tips for parents?
And the first tip I always give is get in the game, get in the game with your kids. And now that you can create easily, so easily create. account and you have this portal now where you have this dashboard visibility, it would be so easy for you to have your child teach you how to play Roblox and it is.
It is so much fun. And I think that once you get in there, you start having conversations with your child. You find commonalities, you understand why they love it so much, and it’s less scary for you to understand what your Children are doing. And then the second thing is keep the lines of communication open instead of threatening.
You know, you’re gonna take the devices away from them, which makes them not want to tell you if something that does happen, keep those lines of communication open so that you can have really healthy conversations about what’s going on. And again, we have a website at Roblox.com/familycenter that has all of our information about how to have conversations with young kids with your tweens and with your teens and they’re slightly different and it’s channeled to empower your child at these different ages And then the final tip that I give is now that we have all of these updated parental controls Please please go in and use them
Larry: And in addition to protecting against harm, which of course is your, I presume, number one job as a company that cares about safety. There’s the other aspect of encouragement. Encouraging people to thrive, encouraging people to interact with and have positive experiences with people who they might not encounter maybe in their community. Perhaps they live in a small town and don’t know anyone who has a different religion or a different background or may have different sexual orientations or things of that nature.
Have you found any positive stories about people getting to know other people in a gaming environment which expands their horizons?
Tami: We have lots. I think that we could probably schedule another podcast so that I could regale you with the stories that are just really, it’ll just get to your heart.
A lot of the experiences that we’ve developed on Roblox have given a lot of kids, from a self expression standpoint confidence, right? So they’ve also, some of the experiences have provided mental health support. I’ll give you an example. We have an experience on roadblocks that focuses on mindfulness. And when we launched that specific game, we had in the first week, something like 8 million players go in , and experience what meditation did for their mental health and the feedback, that feedback that we got was incredible. There was a player that wrote to us that said his parents were getting a divorce.
And it was a really, really stressful time. And when his parents started arguing, he would put on his headset and go into this mindfulness experience. And it created this sense of calm that he had never experienced before. And he really, really appreciated learning the power. of meditation. So, you know, that’s an example for mental wellness that we continue to work on.
There is a partner that we work with. Be Internet Awesome is another experience that has just been launched on our platform that teaches kids about media literacy skills. That’s great. How to spot a scam. How to, what to do if you’re bullied. What to do if you know what to do if somebody asks you for a trade.
We have all of these different experiences that have provided kids tools and education on how to thrive.
Larry: That’s amazing. We actually were involved in the original launch of Internet Awesome. Have you actually, so that game, so to speak, now comes along. Oh, that’s fantastic.
Tami: It’s created an actual game for the Internet Awesome with us. And in fact, I will send you the link.
Larry: Yeah, I’m looking for, I’m looking forward to trying that. That’s great. Well, Tami, it’s been a great conversation. Anything that we should add to what we’ve talked about?
Tami: Other than the three tips that I’ve already highlighted, please have your listeners go in. Please enjoy our new updates to our parental controls. This, again, we continue to evolve and we’re going to be adding more options in terms of features and flexibility for parents over the coming months. So this is not just a one and done announcement.
Larry: Tami, vice president of civility at Roblox. Thanks so much.
Tami: Thank you so much. Always. It’s such a great pleasure, Larry. Thank you so much.