Discord, Roblox Fund ROOST for Open-Source Child Safety Tools

Roblox has been scrutinized for years due to claims of taking a lax approach to online safety for minors. Despite the company’s denial of such claims and their attempts to integrate new protective measures for minors, criticism continued to grow in 2023 and persisted through 2024. Now the game-creation platform has joined forces with other major tech firms to create the Robust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) initiative.

The ROOST initiative was launched at the French AI Action Summit, thanks to a funding of $27 million accumulated over four years. The primary goal of this initiative is to develop “free, open-source safety tools that can be used by organizations of all sizes worldwide,” as per a PRNewswire announcement. These tools are designed for detecting, scrutinizing, and reporting child sexual exploitation content, backed by large language models. The idea is to save corporations from having to “reinvent the wheel” by relying on ROOST instead.

The group aspires to expand the features and capabilities of such tools, offering them free of cost to as many organizations as feasible.

Key investors in this initiative include Eric Schmidt, Discord, OpenAI, Google, Roblox, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, AI Collaborative, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, and the Project Liberty Institute.

While this news casts a positive light on companies such as Roblox, it also comes at a time when the video gaming platform is grappling with a vast number of active minor users and recurrent allegations regarding ineffective safety measures for these users. Roblox’s fluctuating financial results and player engagement trends continue, despite the giant platform that it is. Roblox’s stock experienced a slump last week when its forecasted 2025 revenue didn’t meet investor expectations.