As someone who hasn't always been YouTuber
and who has had a very normal job, which people have tried to intrude on for their
own amusement, let me just tell you right now, nobody appreciates what you're doing except
you and your however many subscribers. Hi, and welcome back to me and talking about
whatever I want. Today, I want to talk about online classes and how they're using the Zoom app
and why that's going terribly wrong. But first of course, I'd like to do a comment shout out.
This comment actually goes out to Casey Chapone, who says, "Plot choice. D'Angelo won't share his
skincare routine, because he actually stole the skin from someone else." It's not that clear.
So, today's situation is pretty much the perfect story to represent 2020 as a whole. It involves
social distancing, YouTubers behaving badly, the FBI getting involved because things got way
too serious. It's like something created by an AI, we asked deep machine learning to create an
article. This whole article revolves around Zoom. So, Zoom is a video conferencing app.
It's like Skype, but for businesses. So, I'm on their website and you can see it's been
used by people like 20th Century Fox, Uber, and even Veeva. You know it's a big deal when Veeva
uses your software. I have no idea what Veeva is. But honestly, Zoom is the industry standard when
it comes to this sort of thing. Industry standard, despite having a couple of security issues.
Now recently despite being already at the top, Zoom has boomed in popularity because of the
pandemic. Everyone's using it for everything, because they can't physically meet anymore since
so many schools and businesses got shut down. Zoom is now the number one free app on the App
Store right now. They went from 10 million users a day to 200 million, and it's only been a couple
months according to this CNBC article. Of course with more viewers, comes more money. So, Zoom's
stock has recently surged as you can see from this chart. It's almost creepy how closely
Zoom's stock market surge mirrors a certain other chart that we're looking at right now.
But the reason this is all a big deal is not really the businesses using it, the issue
is that Zoom has become the top used video conferencing app for schools. It's blown up
so much in the world of academics that they added this section to their website right here,
educating over Zoom, where basically they are giving away more free features for schools that
are affected by the pandemic, which is nice. Overall if you were just to look at this from
a glance, nothing seems out of place, but like I mentioned, Zoom has some security issues. When
you couple those security issues with a bunch of high school students, I think you can see how
this is very quickly going wrong. Basically, it's way too easy to join someone else's Zoom
class. All you have to do is find a code from somewhere, someone's computer, anything like that.
Now there are some features you can enable to stop that from happening, but the issue is that
teachers don't have training on using Zoom. They just got thrust into that situation because the
schools closed down and they still had do their job, so it's not like these teachers know how to
prevent this from happening. So, good old YouTube can't leave well enough alone, right? If it's
not bad enough that random people are getting into random classes, YouTubers have now started
specifically crashing Zoom classes for content. Here we have James Charles tweeting, "I want
to join your guys' Zoom classes. Ha ha ha ha ha." Which honestly, what kind of ego trip
is that? Don't get me wrong. I'm all about having my ego stroked as a YouTuber, but you
really just want to join an environment full of teenage girls because you know 80% of
them are probably subscribed to you, right? Anyway, most of the comment section under James'
tweet was basically praising the idea of that, but I did notice an adult and she said, "Don't
do that. Teachers are already trying hard enough to keep their kids' attention and have work
and activities prepared for the kids to do, you would just be an interruption and a
distraction in the little time they get on Zoom." Which for some reason I assumed would be a popular
opinion. It said this person just wound up getting trashed by James's fan base, because they were
like, "It's a joke. You must be fun at parties." Honestly, even if I'm not fun at parties, oh well.
If I'm right, I'm right. This person is definitely right. What do you think a kid in school cares
more about, that their teacher is doing their best to teach them or that their favorite
YouTuber could potentially join and disrupt their class? No wonder the adults who wound up
getting drowned out in that conversation. But of course, the assertions that it's a joke, not
withstanding, a bunch of people wound up doing it anyway. Trolling random online classes,
20,000 views, joining random Zoom classes, 200,000 views, crashing random online
college classes, four million. Why? So yeah, harassing teachers for content became a whole
subgenre within the last week or so on YouTube. Of course, when you have people making bottom of
the barrel content, you're going to have something even further below that. There are just tons
of compilation videos of random clips of this. Someone even turned their entire channel into a
compilation channel of online school trolling. I guess as fun or lighthearted as it was supposed
to be, this obviously had downsides. For one, like I said, nobody seems to be thinking of
the teachers. This comment right here says that random kids joined the class and made fun
of their teacher. Besides that, YouTubers are basically encouraging their followers to go do
it as well by sending such a terrible example. This person in the comments right here is
asking for people's Zoom codes and passwords, that way they can join and cuss your teacher out.
What I personally think might be the worst side of all is that people are losing productivity. "My
school ended up canceling the group FaceTime for the rest of the week because of this. Brought
me more time to sleep instead." Honestly, how hard is it to not harass people? YouTubers
are out here getting people's classes canceled, and I never thought I would see the day that
we got that desperate for content. I say this as somebody who uploads every single day.
My opinion on the matter is, for the most part no one's really being hurt by the Zoom
trolling. Honestly, some of the clips were funny, but it's just really hard to laugh when you
think about how out of touch these YouTubers are with reality, as usual. As a YouTuber, we
can afford to sit around during normal business hours and laugh at a camera and mess with other
people, but these teachers, they still have work to do. That's a sign to them that they have to
complete in order to keep their jobs. Interfering with that just because you are not in that
position is not that comedic to me personally. Basically, I think if you can't realize as a
YouTuber that the pandemic is hitting those teachers that you're messing with much harder
than it's hitting you, I don't think you should be making the content. In fact, like all situations
like this, some people started going way too far, shouting profanity, et cetera. That guy
specifically, according to Twitter, one of his viewers sent in the Zoom chat a video of somebody
and a rat. That I'm not going to get into detail, because I would get this video taken down.
Now, if you're wondering if that's legal, it's not. I mean, crashing random people's Zoom
classes is not against the law, even though it might just be a little dumb, but crashing
these classes and sharing illegal content, it's in the title, it's illegal. It
actually has a name, Zoombombing. See, I found a New York Times article and it turns
out that the YouTubers doing this for fun and games and ad revenue is just the tip of the
iceberg. Instead of just random trolling, there are actually people spreading
hate speech and targeted harassment. People are joining Zoom calls and screencasting
adult videos. Zoom has a drawing feature and they're using that to draw inappropriate imagery,
as well as slurs. Then of course, some people are just shouting the racial slurs. You're just a bad
person and bad at technology. So, this New York Times article actually investigated and found
the groups that were dedicated to Zoombombing. They're on Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and
4chan, which is not surprising in the least. In this article, they detail how they found
messages of someone claiming that they're going to crash a Baptist church call and share
gore and other inappropriate content that I still can't name. On top of that, there's an
entire Discord servers dedicated to Zoombombing, where people have actually turned it into a
competition. They're assigning points based on how badly you can harass the people in the Zoom call.
The New York Times found over a dozen Discord servers dedicated to that, one which had over
2,000 members. People are branching out from just harassing school children and teachers and
business people, they're targeting harassment against Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and online
hotlines, just to name a few places. So whereas I wouldn't say that YouTubers doing this are
bad people, they're just being really dumb, there are actual bad people doing very bad and
very illegal things through the power of Zoom. Now of course, these social media platforms
that I named want nothing to do with this, so almost all of them spoke out against it since
it's against their terms of service. Instagram is fighting back by blocking the hashtags for
Zoombombing and removing accounts dedicated to it. Reddit shut down entire subreddits that were
being used for Zoombombing, Discord closed the servers and banned some users over it as well.
4chan did nothing, because why would they do anything? What did you expect? It's probably
still happening, unfortunately as we speak. Basically everyone was trying to step in and to
stop this from happening, but of course it was still spiraling out of control. That is when the
FBI got involved, ladies and gentlemen. Some of the hate speech and illegal content was getting
so bad that people had been just repeatedly reporting it to the FBI, and so they stepped
up with their statement. In this statement, they outlined that one teacher actually got
doxed on the Zoom call and another Zoom class had someone flash swastika tattoos to the students.
So the FBI gave out what probably could have avoided a lot of this in the first place, which is
a handy tutorial on how to stop random people from joining your Zoom classes. Basically just disable
community screensharing, stop sending the links in public spaces, and enable the password/Waiting
Room. That way you have to get screened before you can join the call with the literal children.
Hijacking teleconferences to share illegal content is a cyber crime. So if you see it, report it, and
that's also what they put in their FBI statement. So Discord, Instagram, Reddit, and the FBI all
responded and tried to make the situation better. What did Zoom actually do? They responded, and
honestly, I think they're doing the best they can. They said in the response blog that
they posted that they're freezing the work on all their other features and they're going
to devote all their attention to stopping the Zoombombing. They switched all of the education
Zoom profiles to where you have to use the Waiting Room feature. I think most importantly, they were
just honest in their press release, that the app blew up bigger than they could have expected.
I think as much as Zoom dropped the ball, it's important to remember that they did start
getting 20 times the amount of traffic that they were used to pretty much overnight because
of something that they had no control over. But it really seems like they're doing their
best to cut down on the problem and that they want to be open with people, because it says
starting next week, they're going to hold a webinar where they answer further questions.
Ultimately, the situation is still an issue, but the FBI's on it, Zooms on it, et cetera. I'm
very disappointed in the YouTubers, they're just making us all look bad as always. Honestly,
how does it feel to wind up in the same story as federal criminals? As someone who hasn't always
been a YouTuber and who has had a very normal job, which people have tried to intrude on for their
own amusement, let me just tell you right now, nobody appreciates what you're doing except
you and your however many subscribers. I feel bad for the teachers involved, but I'm sure
there'll be okay. Honestly, probably not the worst thing they've heard in the class full of 14 to
16-year-olds. Obviously, the literal criminals that are involved, I hope the FBI catches
them. That's where the situation is as of now, who knows it may get better, but it probably
won't. I mean, let's be honest, this webinar that Zoom is about to hold, it's definitely
going to get Zoombombed. So honestly, who cares?
