ROBLOX YouTuber & Taiwan Supporter Breaks Through Great Firewall to Connect With Players of China's Heavily Censored Version

This is a surreal and zany and ultimately fairly dark video by top ROBLOX YouTuber Ruben Sim. Based in the US but a passionate supporter of Taiwanese independence from China (he was galvanized by the recent Hong Kong democracy protests), Ruben employed a VPN to break through mainland China's "Great Firewall" to engage with Chinese players of Luobu, the country's heavily censored version of ROBLOX.

"Getting over the Firewall from the US is easy because most Chinese websites don't refuse connection to American IPs," as Ruben explains to me now. "It's mostly the other way around where Chinese ISPs refuse to connect their own customers to American servers."

It took Ruben awhile to find English-speaking Chinese players willing to talk with him:

"I had been using Luobu for a few weeks before I found [name redacted for obvious reasons], who was the first person I ever saw speaking English," says Ruben. "I'm pretty sure he just used a standard VPN to encrypt his internet traffic so his ISP couldn't identify what he was connecting to...  [He] never said anything that could be deemed subversive or contrary to the interests of the state, so I'm not worried about him being contacted by police or anything like that."

Then again, as noted recently, ROBLOX in the US also bans political expression. But Ruben isn't concerned that he himself will be flagged by the company.

"They can't do shit," he puts it bluntly. "[The moderation team] doesn't have the power to take down every rule violation on their platform. If they allowed political expression I'm sure there would be a lot more serious activism-focused games being made."

This is probably true. And while ROBLOX the company continues talking about becoming the Metaverse, it's worth noting that Ruben's video is much more faithful in spirit to the original Metaverse from Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk classic.

Expect more videos on the topic from Ruben Sim soon, he tells me.

Comments

[Tye Tass]

Damn right they can’t do shit!

[Chad Thundercock]

Indeed they cannot do shit

[Adit]

THEY CAN'T DO SHIT!