Newton City Council Meeting Interrupted With Racist Rants

NEWTON, MA — The Monday night City Council meeting attended by some 200 people was interrupted with racist comments in the chat section that escalated to people making the comments aloud in a meeting that was not meant to invite public comment.

"We have a situation in the chat right now, where someone is, frankly, using racist language and is harassing people," councilor Jake Auchincloss said in the middle of a discussion about a proposal on who can nominate property to be designated historical in the city. "This person needs to be removed immediately."

City Council President Susan Albright asked City Clerk David Olson to kick a user named "Gino," out of the meeting, as Councilor Marc Laredo called for the meeting to halt until the chat was shut down.

"I find that very disruptive," he said of the racist rants in the chat, adding the council wouldn't permit such interruption during an in-person meeting. Later Councilor Rick Lipof echoed that sentiment, noting that no public comment was scheduled for the meeting.

The interloper who had referenced George Floyd, Minneapolis police and Hitler several times throughout the meeting in the chat was kicked out. Another person using the screen name of "Larry" said "I hate black people," and someone else with the screen name of "gerald" said "George Floyd was a foreign spy," before city councilors pleaded to have those kicked from the meeting.

With more than 200 people logged in, and one person manning the chat, it took a bit longer than Olson would have liked to have the people disrupting the meeting kicked out. As the host, Olson, said he had to search for them in the chat list and mute and then boot them.

“We can’t really run the meeting this way. That seems clear,” said Albright before city council shut down the meeting on Zoom, and restarted it as a webinar streamed on NewTV instead.

With more meetings and classes moving online to slow the spread of the new coronavirus, the FBI's office in Boston has reported an increase in reports of "Zoom-bombing," where someone interrupts a meeting held on the online meeting platform Zoom, and shouts or uses the screen share function without permission and shares images which often include hate-filled rants.

The city council has had to respond to at least one incident of such incident before Monday, and Newton South high school has had unwanted visitors to its online classes.

Zoom has a number of ways for a host to approach unwanted disruptions, including allowing the person who is hosting the meeting to mute the offender's microphone or kick them out of the meeting or into a waiting room. Zoom also has settings that can require participants to wait in a waiting room before being allowed into the meeting, and to not allow the chat function to anyone but the host, or shutting down the chat function completely. A host can also force mute all participants at the same time and toggle a setting that will not allow participants to unmute unless the host unmutes them manually. But even that last option isn't without drawbacks during a fast-paced meeting with multiple councilors vying to speak, said Olson.

"We are trying to balance Open Meeting Law with allowing people to attend meetings and to be part of the meeting," Olson told Patch. "Unfortunately it was this last time that there were some that didn't play by the rules."

This meeting will continue Wednesday and Thursday and what will be different, according to Olson is that the city will be using a webinar package from Zoom, which allows invited participants to interact, but everybody else will only be able to observe.

"It's something we can only use in this instance because we know that we're not going to take public comment and it's not a hearing," he said. "Zoom bombing is going to be something that happens when we have to allow the public to be part of the meeting and comment and have testimony in a public hearing."

Watch the full meeting here, thanks to NewTV:

Read more:

• 'Zoom-Bombing' On Rise As Coronavirus Moves ...
• Newton High School Class Zoom-Bombed With Anti-Chinese ... (April 21)
• High School Zoom-Bombed With Racist Rant ... (May 1)

Patch reporter Jenna Fisher can be reached at Jenna.Fisher@patch.com or by calling 617-942-0474. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram (@ReporterJenna).Have a press release you'd like posted on the Patch? Here's how to post a press release, opinion piece.