"Zoom-bombers": On Anonymity

On June 18th, I attended a webinar hosted by The Choice Agenda, titled: “Fight for Firewalls: HIV and Health Data Privacy in the Snowballing Surveillance State.” At approximately 09:16 CDT, the event was abruptly interrupted by an act that stunned everyone present. Through the speakers, the unmistakable sound of a man moaning filled the virtual room—at first faint, then impossible to ignore. For a few moments, the presenter continued, unaware or perhaps uncertain of what was unfolding. But soon the webinar came to a halt. The realization settled heavily: someone was either actively masturbating or simulating it for shock value. The irony was difficult to ignore. A space dedicated to confronting the harms of exposure, surveillance, and systemic vulnerability was itself exposed—violated in the very terms it sought to resist. 

I did not see the screen shift—thankfully—but the audio alone was enough to provoke discomfort, confusion, and a palpable sense of shame. Why shame, I wondered? I was ashamed that someone—another human being—had seized upon a space devoted to unpacking exploitation and injustice, only to exploit it themselves for a form of gratification that felt not just intrusive, but disturbingly sociopathic.  Whether it was purely auditory or involved a visual component as well, the effect was the same: the deliberate insertion of sexually explicit content into a space meant for dialogue, learning, and community-building around urgent public health issues. It was not simply disruptive; it was a targeted act of disrespect—an intrusion designed to humiliate, destabilize, and desecrate the seriousness of the conversation. 

For the presenters and organizers who had labored to bring the event to life, it must have been a moment they wished had never occurred. And yet, despite the violation, the presentation continued. There was an undeniable unease that lingered in the air, a tremor beneath the words—but also, in the flurry of messages in the webinar chat and the quiet steadiness of the co-organizers, a visible determination to reclaim the space. It wasn’t just about supporting the presenter. It was about refusing to let the intrusion define the event. About standing, as a collective, against the act, not by silencing it, but by moving forward in defiance of it.  

In The Choice Agenda’s post-event resources, which includes a recording of the webinar, the timestamp jumps from 09:16:21 to 09:17:12. These 51 seconds completely disappeared, wiped from existence it would seem, other than to those who attended it would seem. And at one level, this is truly understandable. The act was grotesque, an affront to not just the dignity of everyone present, but humankind. But in erasing those 51 seconds without explanation, something else was also lost: the fact that this happened. That it could happen. That it did happen here, in a space meant to protect and empower those already at risk of institutional surveillance, medical stigmas, and data exploitation.  

I did a quick google search after the event to see whether “Zoom-bombing” is a natural occurrence, and encountered an article from 2020, talking about how an AIDS activist group’s video chat was hijacked by hackers, who subsequently made obscene gestures and screened pornography. These aren’t simply one-off accidents or coincidences, they’re intentional infiltrations of spaces organized by and for marginalized communities. So, what’s the significance of me trying to talk about an act that we should otherwise erase from memory?  

I want to draw attention to a large motivator to this behavior: anonymity.  

This anonymity—the ability to enter, violate, and vanish—makes these attacks especially difficult to contend with, precisely because there is often no clear subject to hold accountable. And when accountability dissolves, so too does the urgency to speak of what occurred. I understand why the organizers chose not to include those 51 seconds in the final recording. Their decision was not an erasure in the malicious sense, but a form of care—an attempt to shield others from the harm we witnessed, and to protect the integrity of the space they had worked so hard to build. However, to acknowledge the event is not to condemn the act of editing, but to name the structural conditions that make such editing feel necessary. It is to recognize that when harm is done anonymously, what’s at stake is not only justice but narratability: the right to mark the breach, and the ability to remember that it happened at all.  

Silence, too, has a history. And what we choose not to name—however well-intentioned—shapes the archive of our digital and political futures.