After discovering she would have to defend her doctoral thesis online, because the coronavirus shut down her campus, Chaya Stern was disappointed. She had, after all, devoted six years to her Ph.D., all while being a first-generation student and mother of two. But as she watched the pandemic devastate her home of New York City, she understood the gravity of the situation and readied for her online defense.
Besides, she had live-streamed lectures before using Zoom and was familiar with the video conferencing platform which has now become the go-to online classroom tool for universities as the pandemic has shut down more than 200 campuses in the country.
As the days inched toward her defense, Stern’s excitement grew. Always a proponent of publicly-accessible science, she shared her defense’s Zoom link on Twitter, encouraging people to listen in.
On the day of her defense, before she could even move beyond her title slide, the harassment began. Internet trolls and racist hecklers decided to join her Zoom session and interrupt her thesis defense.
“I’m in the middle of talking and, all of a sudden, I see some red marks and I’m not sure what’s happening,” said Stern. “Then this person just writes the N-word across my title slide. I had no idea what was going on.”
The harassers proceeded to draw on her screen and make inappropriate jokes 
Stern’s experience is far from unique. The number of racist and vitriolic attacks on the video conferencing platform, now termed “Zoombombing,” have proliferated in the past two weeks as universities transition courses online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
