We Will Be Heard
Trolls ‘Zoombombed’ TikTok’s Pride event with racist and homophobic slurs, shutting down the day-long event only minutes after it started
A virtual event hosted by the short-form video company TikTok was forced to shut down on Thursday just five minutes after it had started after trolls inundated the Zoom call with homophobic and racist slurs.
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A virtual event hosted by the short-form video company TikTok was forced to shut down on Thursday just five minutes after it had started after trolls inundated the Zoom call with homophobic and racist slurs.
- TikTok organized a day-long virtual Pride event Thursday over Zoom for hundreds of LGBTQ creators, consisting of workshops, panels, and fireside chats with employees.
- However, just minutes into it, the Zoom call was overrun with uninvited trolls who filled the chat and took over the audio with racist and homophobic slurs.
- In a transcript of the Zoom call’s text chat sent to Business Insider, trolls almost immediately flooded the chat with messages about “Straight Pride,” Donald Trump, and Chick-fil-A, the food chain that donated millions of dollars to anti-LGBTQ organizations. Some Zoombombers, with usernames like “GayNotOkay,” repeatedly posted slurs for Black people and queer individuals in the chat.
- In late 2019, TikTok admitted that it had used a set of policies to suppress content created by users they dubbed “vulnerable to bullying,” including fat, disabled, and queer people. TikTok has said that those policies are no longer in use.
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