Zoom-Bombing Hotbed: 100s of Twitter Accounts Openly Share Zoom Codes

Twitter has become the epicenter of organized Zoombombing as hundreds of accounts promoting this burgeoning social media trend have cropped up over the last two weeks. Zoombombing is officially its own content industry and people are finding creative ways to extend their social media brands with is.

Zoombombing, the act of “crashing” a Zoom group chat uninvited with the intention of disrupting it, has evolved. What started as a few instances of people being rude has become a daily social media event thanks to Zoom raids: the term describing the scenario where people give out codes for Zoom chats they’ve been invited to, with the hopes that a person or group of people will Zoombomb it. It’s a major disruption when one person shows up uninvited, but imagine what happens when the people who join are part of a roving group of Twitter commenters, jumping from chat-to-chat for giggles.

The Zoombombing culture on Twitter is approaching some kind of critical mass as every part of the platform is being leveraged in some way to promote ruining Zoom meetings. There’s a litany of hashtags, like #zoomcode which has new codes being shared literally every 10 minutes when it’s slow. There are the dozens of accounts that exist solely to either retweet Zoom codes other people share, or to request people send them codes themselves. There are even people who receive so many codes, they’ve established off-site raid request forms for people to send them Zoom chats to crash in an organized fashion. Not only is Zoombombing growing in popularity; it’s also becoming an interactive event for those unwilling to do it themselves. Combine all of this with the fact that people are recording these Zoom raids and producing video highlight reels, and it’s easy to see how Zoombombing has become its own genre of entertainment.

How Platforms Are Reacting to Zoombombing

There is nothing inherently wrong about joining a Zoom meeting uninvited, and the some people are offering free lessons encouraging random viewers. However, the majority of actual Zoombombing occurences are malicious by intent, and that should violate most platforms’ terms of service. Still, bans aren’t enough as sharing a link to a chat is something that can be done with almost complete anonymity.

Zoom itself has outlined multiple processes and policy changes to enhance the security of its meetings. Most notably, it added password protection by default to basic, free group chats just this past weekend. However, that has only led to potential Zoom raiders sharing both the room’s ID and its password, sidestepping the company’s solution entirely. Meanwhile, YouTube is banning the Zoombombing videos shared there if they violate its user policy, and TikTok has taken similar steps on a person-by-person basis. However, unless these companies go deep enough to start IP bans, nothing prohibits offenders from continuing their chat-ruining antics with a new account. In fact, most of them start off by making a new account specifically for these purposes.

Ultimately, the only thing that can be done to truly stop Zoombombing is for Zoom itself to lock down its invite system. The accessibility of Zoom is the biggest factor in its recent rise to the top of the video conferencing charts but it’s becoming clearer every day that the company has erred egregiously on the side of ease-of-use, and everyone is paying the price. Zoom offers many ways to chat privately, so Zoombombing isn’t a threat to the platform’s more informed users, but for those new to the platform (which describes most of its users), no amount of tutorials from Zoom’s PR team will teach them to be more careful with their room IDs and passcodes.

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