Court Orders YouTuber To Stay Off 'Roblox' After Leading “Cybermob”

A California court has ordered a YouTuber to stay off Roblox, after the Roblox Corporation successfully filed a lawsuit against him for leading a “cybermob” that terrorised the platform.

The Roblox Corporation filed the lawsuit against Benjamin Robert Simon, better known as Ruben Sim, in November last year. As reported by Polygon, they originally wanted to claim $1.6 million dollars in damages, but that amount has been lowered to $150,000 dollars, alongside some extra court orders, which includes the agreement for Simon to stay away from the platform.

In the lawsuit, Simon was described as the “leader of a ‘cybermob’ that with malice, fraud, and oppression, commits and encourages unlawful acts designed to injure Roblox and its users”. Some of these “unlawful acts” include: “posting false and misleading terrorist threats to discourage Roblox users from participating in in-person and online events”, “glamorising the April 3, 2018 active shooter and murder at YouTube headquarters […] and threatening/taunting a copycat act of terrorism at Roblox headquarters”, and “engaging in sexual harassment”.

Simon had already been banned from the platform before, originally for using racist and homophobic slurs, but had apparently continued to access it by hacking and using other users’ accounts. 

He was accused of using accounts with sexual names, and also “attempting to upload a sex game”. Roblox is, of course, a game which is heavily populated by children, so it’s unsurprising that the company decided to take such strong action in order to protect this vulnerable audience, especially when Simon also has such a huge platform on YouTube (he currently has over 800K subscribers).

The YouTuber has agreed that he won’t make any false statements about Roblox, go near their office, incite violence against any of its employees, or make any videos that glamourise the violation of Roblox’s rules (including getting around being banned from the game). He’s also got to remove any old YouTube videos that violate these terms.