- A US court permanently banned a
Roblox YouTuber from playing the game. - Roblox sued YouTuber Ruben Sim in November for terrorizing users and employees.
A US court this month fined and permanently banned a controversial Roblox YouTuber from playing the game.
The Roblox Corporation sued
Roblox is a massively popular gaming platform for children over the age of 10 where players can play games or create and build new worlds. It has also come under fire for "exploiting" young game developers and has been accused of being "unsafe" for children.
Court documents filed January 14 reveal Ruben Sim, whose real name is Benjamin Robert Simon, was ordered by the Oakland court to pay the company $150,000 — significantly less than the $1.6 million the company initially asked for.
Simon did not respond to Insider's request for comment. In video posted to his YouTube channel, titled "Roblox Is Suing Me For $1.6 Million" on January 15, he said he would "go over the merits of their filing and its chilling effect on freedom of expression."
Simon, who has over 800,000 subscribers on YouTube, also had to agree he wouldn't make false statements about Roblox, wouldn't encourage violence against its employees, wouldn't come within 100 feet of the company's offices, and wouldn't create or publish videos that make "false threats of terrorist activity relating to Roblox," glamorize violating the platform's rules, or show how to use the game even after being banned.
The lawsuit against Simon, filed on November 23, alleged he tried to upload a picture of Hitler and a naked photo of himself "with only a lampshade covering his genitals." It also accused him of engaging in the sexual
The lawsuit said Simon used of "racial and homophobic slurs" and said he cyber-bullied Roblox employees and executives by posting libelous personal accusations about them. Roblox also alleged that in the game, Simon subjected players to "ridicule or abuse," according to the lawsuit.
The reference to "terrorist activity" refers to Simon allegedly discussing the shooting at YouTube's headquarters in 2018 with his fans, and his posting "a terrorist bomb threat" to his Twitter account that said police were looking for a "notorious Islamic Extremist" in San Francisco, when a Roblox conference was taking place.
In his January 15 video, Simon criticized Roblox for initially asking for all his YouTube revenue and the deletion of all his social media accounts. He also refuted claims made by Roblox in the lawsuit about photoshopping and sharing a picture of the company's social media manager. Simon said the photo he shared, in which the man appeared naked, was publicly available for anyone to find on a fetish porn blog.
"I have the right to ridicule someone when they do something stupid," Simon said in the video. "I don't have the right to accuse people of things they have never done to scare them into a legal settlement because they can't afford to go to trial."
Simon also questioned why he was being sued, saying he had previously made videos calling out predatory behavior from adults towards children on the platform, which he says the company ignored. He said he would address more of the allegations in the lawsuit in subsequent videos.
Roblox told Insider it had no comment beyond the lawsuit.