Why tech giants sacrifice children for growth

Why tech giants sacrifice children for growth

From News from the Woods by by Filip Molcan

November 29, 2025 · 23 min

About this episode

The episode discusses how tech companies prioritize profits over child safety, highlighting a troubling interview with Roblox's CEO.

From Roblox’s CEO calling child predators an “opportunity” to Meta’s internal research showing Instagram harms teen girls, a pattern emerges across every major platform: companies know their products damage children and choose profits anyway. This report examines the evidence across Roblox, Meta, TikTok, and AI companies, revealing why self-regulation has failed and what parents need to understand about the forces shaping their children’s digital lives. The timing is critical. In November 2025, Roblox CEO David Baszucki’s disastrous interview exposed the mindset driving Silicon Valley’s approach to child safety. But Baszucki isn’t an outlier—he’s representative of an industry that has systematically prioritized growth metrics over children’s wellbeing for over a decade. The Roblox case reveals an industry-wide pattern When New York Times journalists Casey Newton and Kevin Roose asked Roblox CEO David Baszucki about “the problem of predators” on his platform—used by 150 million daily active users, most of them children —his response shocked listeners: “We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well.” The interview , published November 21, 2025, became…

Topics covered

  • child safety
  • technology ethics
  • digital wellbeing
  • corporate responsibility
  • social media impact

Keywords

  • child safety
  • Roblox
  • Meta
  • Instagram
  • teen girls
  • corporate ethics
  • digital lives
  • predators
  • self-regulation

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Roblox, Meta, TikTok

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