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IPFS News Link • Education: Colleges and Universities

As COVID-19 Forces Classes Online, Colleges Face New Challenge: "Zoombombing"

• https://www.zerohedge.com, by Blair Nelson

Due to the coronavirus, colleges and businesses have had to relocate their classes and meetings onto online video conferencing platforms, such as Zoom. According to the FBI, many Zoom video conference calls have been subjected to some form of hijack.

"The FBI has received multiple reports of conferences being disrupted by pornographic and/or hate images and threatening language."

There have been several incidents of this happening in various college courses and meetings. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for example, a mandatory diversity workshop called I-connect was hijacked recently. An individual appeared in the Zoom call showing a swastika on their forehead. This led to a series of mass emails that were sent to students who attended these sessions.

"During these workshops, online participants engaged in patterns of disruptive behavior, which culminated in hateful interruptions by a number of individuals using racist and derogatory slurs, showing images of swastikas, and making threats of violence," said one of the mass emails.

The school said that it would report the incident to the Office of Student Conflict, as well as the Bias Assessment Response Team. 

"Any behavior deemed to be a legal violation will also be reported to the University of Illinois Police Department" UIUC added.


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