File photo of a disappointed woman.
February 28th, 2023
Some Zoom chat may have crossed a line during a recent RM of McKillop council discussion around a contentious issue. While we won’t be sharing what was posted, we’ve heard concerns about it, with one person saying they considered it sexual harassment.
Chat on Zoom allows people to message the meeting group and privately message individual users. The meeting host has the option to disable the chat.
We reached out to the McKillop Reeve Bob Schmidt regarding what happened. A Reeve chairs the meeting and has control over conduct at the meeting, and can expel any person who disturbs a meeting or acts improperly. “...Unfortunately, I did not see the comments because I was facing away from the monitor during the meeting.
As usual, we recorded the Zoom audio to place on our website, but I do not know at this time if the chats were set to record. So I asked our administrator to check and get back to Council,” he said.
While Zoom does have a Chat Etiquette Tool for the administrator of an account to institute a chat policy where keywords will automatically trigger a warning asking the sender to confirm that’s what they want to send—basically an opportunity to rethink your actions. There is also an option of outright blocking a message if it hits on a specific word. It’s unlikely that the specific post in question would’ve triggered that, as the words used wouldn’t meet any of the typical words one would typically consider offensive.
“As a solution to any further abusive activity, we may require authentication and registration of participants for our zoom meetings. That way, we would be able to take appropriate action should the need arise. But, this update would require a decision of Council and changes to our Council Procedures Bylaw,” said Schmidt.
