Racist Zoombombing

Lisa Nakamura, Hanah Stiverson, Kyle Lindsey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000388350
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Medios digitales

This book examines Zoombombing, the racist harassment and hate speech on Zoom.

While most accounts refer to Zoombombing as simply a new style or practice of online trolling and harassment in the wake of increased videoconferencing since the outbreak of COVID-19, this volume examines it as a specifically racialized and gendered phenomenon that targets Black people and communities with racialized and gendered harassment. Racist Zoombombing brings together histories of online racism and algorithmic warfare with in-depth interviews by Black users on their experiences. The book explains how Zoombombing is a form of racial violence, interrogates our ideas about online space and community, and challenges our notions of on and off line distinction between racial harassment of Black people and communities.

A vital resource for media, culture, and communication students and scholars that are interested in race, gender, digital media, and digital culture.

1 New Platform, Same Racists

How Social Media and Gaming Route Racist Hatred to Zoom

Zoombombing has become increasingly common, with thousands of individual cases reported by journalists and many more cases that were not. Though a very large archive of racist zoombombing events emerged and continues to evolve, we chose to analyze three specific events in order to understand their media ecology: where they come from, how they are executed, and their effects upon targets.¹ How do zoombombers find their victims? Zoombombers leave tracks on the Internet that help us understand their techniques for mobilization and clear indications of the platforms where they prefer to collaborate. Multiple social platforms integrate with Zoom to create an easy path for online hatred to follow people of color and women. This has become more common as classrooms and student life increasingly integrate with social media, with events being organized on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Dr. Tiara Moore, who we interviewed for this book, advertised her women of color academics’ group on Twitter because she wanted to cast a wide net in the name of inclusion. This chapter will focus specifically on Discord and 4chan because they offer the greatest structural advantages to zoombombers and other online abusers: they are anonymous or pseudonymous, it is easy to create new groups when old ones are taken down or banned for violations, and they already host robust communities of white supremacists and far-right adherents who have either been banned or are not welcome on other social network sites.

The old argument that gamers do not deserve protection from harassment because they are playing “for fun” was always a flawed and discriminatory claim, and certainly no longer holds when everyone’s online spaces are so blurred between “fun” and work. Zoom has become ubiquitous with the workday for many. Even those that use it for community building or “fun” have little choice of platform considering the pandemic and Zoom’s hegemony. Given that we know that racism and sexism are fixtures of online gaming and that the industry and its core fans have intentionally created and defended this identity as an antidote to “PC” culture and a bastion of “free speech,” it is not surprising that these same people have brought these bombing techniques to Zoom.

Though racism and sexism might not always be the most obvious motivator of online harassment, they have historically defined the activity. As Whitney Phillips writes in her book This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, racism is a way of hacking the attention economy.² Critical race theory understands racist acts in public as more than bids for attention; they are tactic and a strategy to create a world where people of color are unwelcome, treated as not-people, and both erased and made hypervisible as racist spectacle.

On April 8, 2020, the Associated Press reported that “law enforce- ment agencies across the country are trying to adapt and respond to reports of uninvited guests on videoconferencing platforms who make threats, interject racist, anti-gay or anti-Semitic messages, or show pornographic images.”³ How can we tell the difference between racism as a cynical move meant to attract attention – and “felt” racism, racism as part of an ideology that extends out into and organizes a person’s life and politics? Does intention much matter here? We say no. Intent truly doesn’t matter when the actions cause harm. The distinction between individuals who recognize themselves as racist and those who use racism without viewing themselves that way is completely illegible and inconsequential to those who have to live with the fallout of these experiences. This chapter focuses on the networks and platforms that support these actions rather than the individuals who take part in these acts of harassment and hate. In this book, we focus on the experiences of Black people who have been targeted by zoombombers because they exemplify the harm that videoconference drive-by racism creates, especially in the context of COVID-19 and during a period of intense protest and public discourse about the value of Black lives. We did not interview zoombombers for this project as their thoughts and reasoning on this issue are beyond inconsequential. Instead, we analyze artifacts from platforms where these campaigns unfold and draw our conclusions from their own words and actions.

Some zoombombers identify themselves as racists or misogynists, as part of the manosphere or broadly defined far-right, but many do not. Whether or not bombers claim this identity, the activities that emerge from these spaces provide the conditions for these ideologies to continue to spread and thrive. In this chapter, we analyze data captured from youth-oriented platforms such as Discord and 4chan to show how zoombombers represent their activity on a continuum of racism, at times as innocuous homosocial acts of male bonding, and at other times as ideological attacks on “snowflakes,” “libtards,” and Black people.

On April 14, 2020, a 4chan board user (all 4chan users are anonymous) who organized an attack on his “fat bitch landwhale of 400 pounds” teacher posted specific advice to participants, saying “join with real-sounding names or she won’t let you in,” and after she had closed the link, praised the group by saying “good job lads.” (Figure 1.1) Though the student displays misogyny toward his teacher to rally strangers on 4chan to attack her, in the end it’s the bond between the group that they celebrate. “Laddish” behavior is archetypally defined as annoying but harmless, however it highlights the spectrum between “normal” versus toxic masculinity. It’s a new articulation of an old and tired claim that “boys will be boys” while making invisible the actual violence of these normative behaviors. Similarly, conversations around gendered acts often obfuscate the racial components that make up much of the violence and the sense of entitlement to frameworks of power. The Internet has only increased the scope of this type of behavior through an expansion of who, what, and where “laddish” behavior is able to target. Zoom is a new and easily accessible space for this gendered and racial dynamic to take place.

Figure 1.1 Screengrab from 4chan.

Even seemingly innocuous examples of zoombombing have racist and sexist undercurrents, which are often overlooked or erased. Internet pundits such as Jordan Peterson produce YouTube videos that route men and boys into radicalized media and social networks that promote real-life violence. This is a time-honored gateway which eases the user into politicized racist and sexist harassment.

This type of pseudo-radicalization (or overt radicalization in other instances) can be a subtle process, and works best when it is couched in humorous, laddish terms. One Discord poster, zoom X, encouraged participants by saying “Let’s make ‘zoom-bombing great again!!!!” a reference to Donald Trump’s political slogan, “Make America Great Again.” Even though there are no other references to Trump and politicized racism in the post, it interpellates Zoom attacks as living on the edge of deniability, irony, and legitimate politicized attacks (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Screengrab from Discord.

We can see the continuum of zoombombing from laddish prank to precisely targeted attacks on queer parents, Black people, and women. On April 23, one organizer encouraged zoombombers to be as “toxic as humanly possible,” and another one specifically requested “the N word please” (Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3 Screengrab from 4chan.

On April 24, 2020, the University of South Carolina’s Association of Black Students held their yearly cookout to support students studying for final exams on Zoom rather than in person. This celebratory event was advertised on Twitter because the event was always “open to all.” There was no record of racist behavior or harassment while the event was held in person; however, moving the event to Zoom created additional opportunities for disruption. As Black students logged onto the event, a swath of violent language and imagery flooded the Zoom call. Swastikas, images of white people wearing blackface makeup, and people shouting the “N” word and “Fortnite!” were projected on their screens. This incident showcases zoombombing’s links to white supremacy both as an ideological framework and as a structure that supports these types of attacks and protects the attackers, not the targets (Figure 1.4).

Figure 1.4 screen capture from YouTube video reporting U. South Carolina zoombombing.

The Black Students’ Association turned to Zoom in an effort to capture some of the intimacy, feeling of presence, and social solidarity that sustained their students in the midst of our collective isolation. After the incident, Bob Caslen, president of the University of South Carolina (USC), released a statement asserting that the university IT office was working with Zoom to identify the culprits and called on students to report any incidents of online racial harassment through the school’s office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).⁴ This statement illustrates why zoombombing is so confounding and so poorly handled by institutions; it falls into a crack between an information technology problem that needs to be addressed by systems engineers and telecommunication specialists and a “climate” problem that would bypass the IT department and become the responsibility of the DEI or personnel office. These two parts of the university tend not to work together. Because zoombombing isn’t like a server crash that affects hundreds of people, it is often addressed as a one-off event or glitch rather than an open door to structural racialized hate. From an IT perspective, zoombombing is a known issue and the fix is to implement preventative measures that displace labor away from Zoom and onto the user. Though indiv...