A group of unidentifiable men hacked a New School faculty member’s Zoom session meeting on Thursday, March 26, making harassing remarks and sharing explicit content.
Jamie Lauren Keiles, a part-time faculty member at Parsons, began teaching a pitch-writing workshop, “How to Write Pitches That Editors Accept,” at 5 p.m. to an audience of 191 attendees.
Keiles was reviewing a slide from their PowerPoint presentation, using the screen-sharing feature, when they were interrupted 10 minutes into their workshop. The unidentified men began saying harassing statements, such as “I want to touch your lips, baby girl because they smell like sauerkraut,” and “can someone show their tits on camera”
“At first, I thought they were just some guys in the chat that were goofing off with their mics on, but then it became clear; they were there to wreak havoc,” Keiles said.
These men haven’t been identified, but Keiles recalls some showing their face, wearing sunglasses, and even one wearing the mask of Atomwaffen, a neo-Nazi group.
Keiles made attempts to mute and kick the members out of the session, but the platform wouldn’t let them.
At one point, one of the members disguised himself as an attendee, assisting the faculty member in removing the hackers from the session. He advised Keiles to stop sharing their screen in order to kick them out.
However, this allowed the members to take over the screen-sharing feature. One member began sharing gay pornography until the faculty member took control and ended the Zoom session.
The harassment lasted for two minutes and 30 seconds, according to a recording of the session.
Keiles created a new Zoom meeting link and emailed it out to everyone who paid to attend their workshop. They were met with no interruptions in this second meeting and gained roughly three-quarters of their original audience.
“I do think it is pretty unfair that people can even be harassed at home in their house,” Keiles said in response to their experience in the session. “Luckily, I feel not too traumatized by it, but I don’t think it’s a great thing to have out there happening in the world.”
Keiles chose not to file any complaints with the platform itself due to their “little faith in tech companies to do anything about harassment.”
The faculty member, however, was concerned about how this would affect teaching their New School courses. Keiles did research on how to prevent people from dropping into Zoom sessions and updated their privacy and security to prevent more incidents from happening moving on forward.
“If people interrupt me in the wider world, it’s not something I can really be responsible for, but I do feel a need to protect my students,” they said.