Zoombombing exposes adaptability of human ugliness
Today, the future is uncertain — even tomorrow is not a given. As the world struggles to adjust to this new and strange reality, it seems that certain individuals have adapted enough to develop a new culture of crime.
Zoombombing is the orchestrated intrusion into Zoom video-conferencing calls, with the intent to disrupt meetings and classes. Though the perpetrators and victims vary, the incidents follow a similar pattern: The meeting begins as normal and at some point, a voice echoes through the lecture — some out-of-place phrase — but the speaker continues. That same voice cuts back in, more persistent, building in volume.
What once was nonsensical babbling suddenly becomes clear: The stranger is chanting the n-word or some other slur. The meeting facilitator scrambles to reclaim control, to identify the intruder. Even if the perpetrator is expelled, there are countless others embedded in the online crowd. Suddenly, the screen switches: A stranger appears or begins streaming pornographic or violent content. The obtrusive voices form a cacophony of auditory assault. The meeting is shut down; by this point, the majority of users have either logged off or remain shocked in disbelief.
At USC, there have been several cases of Zoombombing; the first reported ones in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the other in Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. But who’s doing it? And why?
The New York Times reported 153 Instagram accounts, dozens of Twitter accounts and several then-active message boards on Reddit and 4Chan where thousands of people had gathered for the purpose of organizing Zoom raids. Some accounts, run by middle- and high school-aged students, operate with the goal to disrupt classes in a relatively mild and inoffensive manner to communicate their frustrations; others, like swarms of cockroaches, prefer to conspire in the darker corners of the Web.
On Discord — an app known to be popular in far-right circles — The New York Times found 14 active chats with users sharing meeting passwords and establishing point values for certain types of harassment. Take into account that within a single chat, dozens of messages are being sent per minute — with one housing more than 2,000 users — and the term “Zoombombing” seems less like harmless trolling and more like digital terrorism.
The latter is a serious claim. For every relatively harmless class interruption by a middle-schooler, there are far more Alcoholics Anonymous meetings commandeered, minority-specific groupings targeted with hate speech and religious events attacked with pornographic content. During these intrusions, specific audience members are sometimes targeted, as was the case in a Conejo Valley School District meeting March 24. Board members were sexually harassed, and an unknown voice threatened that home addresses could be discovered as easily as a Zoom meeting password.
This type of trolling is all about control; the intruder sneaks into a meeting that was meant to be private and forces the captive audience to see and listen to whatever is being broadcasted. Even though individuals are physically safe — these intruders are not actually in your computer, since Zoom is an external application and thus isn’t integrated into your device’s security — it still feels violating. The use of derogatory and threatening language and pornographic content is purposefully abrasive, meant to use shock value to attack people who are already feeling isolated during this period of self-quarantine.
There is no doubt that Zoom should be held accountable. The company is already under fire from the New York Attorney General and the FBI. It’s more of a question of whether these problems were unavoidable given the unprecedented influx in the user population.
According to Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, Zoom was aimed toward institutions with full IT support, such as government agencies, universities and financial services. This seems a little unsubstantiated, given that many universities have already fallen victim to Zoombombers.
It’s obvious that the system was not adequately prepared for the sudden wave of new users flooding the online communication app. In addition, Zoom’s claim of “end-to-end encryption for all meetings” has been disproved with each disrupted meeting — thorough encryption isn’t possible if any participants are logged in from a non-computer device. Oded Gal, Zoom’s chief product officer, admitted to the semantic discrepancy overlooked in the advertising.
Yuan has apologized for his company’s shortcomings and committed the next 90 days to bolstering privacy issues instead of adding new features; in addition, the company will release a transparency report which will detail government authority requests for data or content — similar to those shared by Facebook, Google and Twitter.
There will always be those who feel emboldened to spew hate from behind a computer screen, to find and exploit others’ weaknesses. Yesterday it was xenophobes, today it’s Zoombombers, tomorrow it’ll be some other breed of societal cockroach. And those insectoids will always find each other in dark times; in this way, people are remarkably adaptive — for better or worse.
We must guard ourselves against this new culture of virtual hate.