The far-right Zoombombing hate speech crisis in town halls: "a deliberate tactic being employed to remove people's ability to engage democratically"

[anon61221983]

@Kilkrazy

From what I understand, the Zoom sessions being strafed by hordes of far-right-wingers are ruined for genuine participants.

Yeah, I’m aware… but that doesn’t mean that just making it in person would help, since that would cut out a swath of citizens who can’t attend in person (for whatever reason). But perhaps a secure login would help… although as we all know, anything can be hacked, so… and as we’ve seen IN person meetings can also be disrupted.

@Mungrul

“Mindysan uses an awful lot of gifs; maybe too many.”

[DukeTrout]

I haven’t run a meeting using Zoom in a while, but some of the other similar platforms give the organizer a lot of tools to moderate the call, including controlling who presents and muting or removing participants.

@angusm

As a sidenote, it occurs to me that a “public Zoom” with effective moderation controls could just as easily be used by a corrupt local administration to silence critics as by a benign one to neutralize griefers, so there are no slam-dunk solutions here.

But abuse like that is already covered by the same public meeting laws that cover in-person local government meetings. Even better, the proceedings are more easily recorded.

[RickMycroft]

I guess adding an eight second delay loop like a radio talk show would be super annoying.

[anon77190095]

F’ing google meet has (or had, haven’t used it for a bit) for years.

[fnordius]

@angusm

Zoom offers no tools to counter deliberate disruption because, in the original use case, it doesn’t need them.

This is the story of online discourse since the beginning. When it was just for professors and students, the gate was admission to the participating institution. Gatekeeping wasn’t considered because the creators were already behind a gate.

The other pre-Internet communities, the BBS’s and CompuServe and so, were also gate-kept by the horrendous costs of long distance telephone calls, and the cost of setting up a BBS.

@Kilkrazy

Perhaps the council could issue secure login IDs to their constituents to prevent interlopers from gaining access to meetings.

This makes sense, that to participate you have to register beforehand, and submit some sort of proof that you are a valid stakeholder*. Then you would get a login which you are then responsible for, abusing it would get you suspended (permanent-mute, one device only). It could be combined with voter registration, where you could sign up to be notified of all remote meetings (Zoom, MS Teams, whatever).

That might filter out some cranks as well, who would loudly complain that they don’t want to be in any database, but those types always want to have their cake and eat it.

[Doctor_Faustus]

@Mungrul

You know, I thought to myself “Surely Zoom has some sort of Kick functionality, right? You know, that thing that’s been part of game server code for AGES.”
Turns out, nope.

I mean what the actual?

I guess, as a workaround you could place them in breakout rooms. But yeah, looks like it’s just the wrong tool for the job

[Kilkrazy]

If local government needs to be run digitally, they should have a robust set of secure tools designed for the job, rather than just relying on some tech bro startup software because it’s free.