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The dangerous trend of "zombombing" is gaining momentum

Zoom video conferencing application has become a target for attacks and attacks, the organization of which is agreed in private chat rooms outside the platform




In recent weeks, when schools, enterprises, support groups, and millions of individuals turned to Zoom as a meeting platform in a world that is becoming increasingly socially fragmented, there have been frequent reports of activities such as “zombombing” or “zoom raids” in which uninvited persons participate.

Initially, such incidents were simply considered rallies or trolling, but since then they have risen to the level of incitement of hostility and insults, and in the USA they even attracted the attention of the FBI.

Turning into a weapon Zoom - an application for video conferencing, which became a de facto social platform in the era of the coronavirus - is the latest phenomenon in a series of online hooliganism, played out in social networks and in the dark, unmoderated corners of the Internet.

Journalists at The New York Times found 153 Instagram accounts, dozens of Twitter accounts and private chats, as well as several branches on the Reddit and 4Chan forums where thousands of people gather to organize hooliganism campaigns in Zoom, share meeting passwords and plans to bring chaos to public and private meetings.

Zoom hooligans often use images of a shocking nature, racial epithets and obscene language to disrupt video conferencing. Although the meeting organizer can remove any participant at any time, it can be difficult to track down attackers; there can be several in one meeting, and they can jump from one username to another.

On March 29, Zahed Amanullah had chatted with other members of the Concordia forum, a global network of Muslim leaders, in a chat organized by him. They discussed preserving spirituality and health during the coronavirus crisis, when the cursor suddenly began to display offensive characters on one of the slides.

"What is it? How did this happen? ” - asked one of the participants in the meeting. “Did you see what I just saw?”

Then the bully began broadcasting a pornographic video while committing racially offensive remarks.

“We were taken by surprise,” said Amanullah, a senior fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London. “We didn't understand where it came from.”

Bullies began to use all the features of the Zoom platform for insults. They used the ability to set a custom background in order to replace it with an animated GIF with a drinker at a meeting of anonymous alcoholics, and the function of adding comments to post racist remarks at a meeting of the American Jewish Committee in Paris.

“Faced with such rampant hooliganism, you realize that this is not just an isolated case,” said Whitney Philips, associate professor of digital ethics at the University of Syracuse. “This is obviously a systemic phenomenon.”

The popularity of Zoom skyrocketed while the entire population of the planet remains at home, trying to limit the spread of coronavirus. According to SensorTower, a company providing statistics on applications, the number of installations of the Zoom mobile application made for the first time increased by 1126% in March, reaching 76 million, compared with 6.2 million in February.

However, the company did not have time to prepare for the rapid growth of the user base. Zoom began to offer tips and training materials on how to organize meetings securely, but many users were not satisfied with the company's response to certain hooligan incidents.

“At Zoom, they answered something like 'we're sorry,' as if it was just me,” said Dennis Johnson, a graduate student who complained about Zoom after pornography and racist remarks burst into his call during the defense of the candidate. “They treated my case as a rare occurrence - that’s the problem.”

On Tuesday, the company expressed its position on the email. “Zoom strongly condemns this kind of hooliganism, and we are reporting similar cases to various social platforms to take appropriate action,” said Nate Johnson, spokesman for Zoom.

The frequency and prevalence of such incidents on Zoom led the FBI to issue a warning on Thursday saying it “received a lot of complaints from around the country about video calls interrupted by sudden pornography, incendiary images and verbal threats.”

Dozens of Twitter accounts and online forums bring people to private chat rooms in the Discord app, popular among right-wing radicals. There, people share codes for Zoom, at the same time attack video conferences and assign points for hooliganism of a certain kind within the competition. The Times found 14 active chats on Discord, where dozens of messages appear every minute, and more than 2,000 people are in the most popular chats.

“This behavior violates Discord’s terms of use, and we strongly condemn it,” a Discord spokesperson said in an email. - As soon as we discover the servers engaged in such activity, we quickly investigate the issue and proceed with actions that include deleting content, blocking users and shutting down servers.

On Instagram, a network of accounts with names like Zoomraid and Zoomattack started appearing on the weekend, and on Thursday their number of subscribers increased sharply, reaching 30,000. The owners of these accounts publish meeting codes on Zoom so that other people can coordinate password-protected video conferencing raids.

»We do not want Instagram to be used in this way. We will block the hash tags used to coordinate zombombing and delete accounts created solely for this, as soon as we discover them, "the Facebook spokesman said.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, classes in schools across the country for the most part switched to online learning, and many students were poorly adapted to such a new environment.A few Zoom raiding teenagers complained about the disappointment of online learning and said that for them, attacks on Zoom are a way to throw out emotions.This was the only way them to escape from the pressing burden of occupation.

Most of the accounts of teenage bullies are disrupting their studies in the middle and high schools with the help of hindering teachers, but for the most part harmless jokes.

“We do this partly because teachers give us too many assignments,” said James, a 16-year-old teenager in charge of an account created for Zoom raids. - It bothers us. We already go home because of quarantine, and we still need to do homework. We still have control, and I often have to do more work than before, because teachers give us assignments every week, and assignments in different subjects sometimes interfere with each other. It’s very difficult to keep up with all this. ”

Some Instagram accounts about memes, where you can usually find funny videos from TikTok, also began to post meeting information in Zoom to increase their popularity.

“We're starting our Story and posting class information on Zoom,” said Aliya, the 17-year-old administrator of several meme accounts on Instagram. “We say that if you join and do something funny, we will subscribe to you too.”

However, for every annoyed teenager trying to avoid school, there are many people with unkind intentions.

Discord has more vile trends. In one of the chat rooms, a high school class schedule and links to Zoom conferences for each of the lessons were distributed among hundreds of chat members who explicitly stated their intention to misbehave, distracting students and their students.

Another group discussed an attempt to disrupt the dating service organized by the Baptist Church in Virginia. “Right after the start, we'll post a rape there,” one chat member said. “Immediately send all sorts of obscenities there,” another added.

Meetings of anonymous alcoholics, for the most part online through Zoom, have also become a frequent target for attacks. “Have fun with these codes from AA,” one Discord user wrote in a post, and attached links to nearly 600 AA meetings in California. Another uploaded a 28-page document with links to support groups for transgender people and non-binary young people.

Jeff, a 39-year-old member of one of these bands from Los Angeles, said he had attended 30 meetings with Zoom in the last three weeks. And each of them, he said, interrupted some kind of Internet troll.

And now every time Jeff enters the virtual AA group, his heart begins to beat faster. “I feel fear and panic, as well as the sadness that this place is now vulnerable,” he said.

On YouTube and Twitch, an Amazon-owned video game website, videos and live broadcasts of what happens during Zoom’s hooliganism began to appear. For more than six hours, one popular streamer from YouTube broadcast his hooligan tricks that he committed in dozens of AA meetings held at Zoom. Another video posted on March 30, showing a disruption to the college’s learning process, garnered over 4.2 million views and inspired an entire crowd of imitators. One video posted by a youtuber with 1.7 million followers promised to show "raids on online classes," but instead contained hooligan behavior in relation to one of the women at an AA meeting.

“We have strict rules prohibiting content containing hooligan behavior, inciting hate speech or unnecessary sexualization, and we will quickly remove user-tagged content,” said Alex Joseph, YouTube spokesman.

Phillips of Syracuse University said that without more aggressive moderation, Zoom risks that such behavior will soon become the norm. “Platform developers either do not take the risk of hooliganism seriously, or do not foresee this risk - which, in essence, leads to the appearance of one problem,” she said.

Amanullah said he was disappointed that his meeting turned into a platform for hate speech. He said that to attract a wide audience, this group was advertised on social networks.

“Some people turn Zoom into a weapon to show a split in society and spread hatred,” Amanullah said. “People with a certain past take the brunt of it.”

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