By Kyle Van Pelt

Among all the quarantine activities and memes, the relatively new craze of “Zoom bombing” is a controversial onslaught of pranks on school, work, and recreational Zoom sessions. 

On April 11, YouTuber and streamer, Twomad, uploaded a video of himself joining Zoom calls of which he either received the join code from followers or other discrete methods. He pranked random teachers, workers, and students with his sporadic and sometimes shocking humor. While such pranks have been occurring since long before the quarantine was even considered, they have skyrocketed in frequency and severity since Twomad’s video. The pranks in Twomad’s video itself were not seriously detrimental, and the more risqué ones were only pulled on college students or independent adults. In fact, most of the people featured in the video were left with laughter and not anger. 

While Twomad himself mostly only had harmless fun with Zoom calls, others who have copied him are not so innocent. Classes across the internet are now being raided by people attempting to copy Twomad’s insanely sporadic and edgy persona, but often without the pause that he maintains off camera. Twomad puts far more thought into his videos and persona than he portrays. He is in fact a talented editor for Maxmoefoe and Anything4views: the popular Australian YouTube proteges of the king of irreverent internet humor, FilthyFrank. Many want to copy these personas, but often those attempting to do so come off as mean instead of funny. The most famous example of this is Pewdiepie, who outwardly admits he took direct inspiration from FilthyFrank, making a racist joke on a livestream that nearly got him removed from YouTube. Now, such humor is being brought directly to classrooms by trolls who are rarely anywhere near as careful as their idols.