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?