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Wanting to encourage lively but respectful civil engagement as much as possible, Atherton leaders favor keeping the ability for the community to comment remotely — in contrast to other public agencies that have shut it down as hate-filled, so-called Zoom bombings continue.
During its regular meeting Wednesday, Oct. 18, the Atherton City Council considered a staff recommendation to follow suit in suspending public comments via Zoom amid the recent spate of bigoted online speech targeting municipal forums in the Bay Area and elsewhere.
But after some discussion, the council directed staff to keep allowing the public to speak on town matters through the video-conferencing platform — but with safeguards, which the town had already started to put in place.
“I think it’s really important that we enable the public to speak over Zoom without taking the action that Redwood City and others have taken,” Council member Rick DeGolia said. To prohibit that ability is “anti-democratic. … I’d rather opt to be on the side of encouraging democracy than overreacting.”
Redwood City, Burlingame, Milpitas and other Bay Area jurisdictions have for now discontinued remote-access, real-time public comments, instead taking testimony only in person during meetings or through written statements such as those by email.
In a special meeting scheduled for Friday, Oct. 20, the Palo Alto Unified School District board will also consider a temporary ban on taking comments over Zoom. That consideration has been inspired in part by the Zoom bombing earlier in the week of the Palo Alto City Council meeting in which two school board members participated.
Racist and antisemitic remarks remotely bombarded the Palo Alto council meeting’s public-comment period mere minutes after city leaders paid tribute to the victims of the Israel-Hamas war with a show of solidarity and a moment of silence. Palo Alto has no plans to revise its Zoom protocols, however.
Atherton tightened its Zoom procedures after getting ambushed by calls spewing racist or homophobic remarks, at times mixed with profanity, during its last regular council meeting Sept. 20. No such disruption occurred Wednesday.
Among the Zoom changes, Atherton decided that participants on the platform could no longer unmute themselves, share screens or go directly into the main-meeting discussion.
In a report to the council, staff identified other potential strategies to head off hate or off-topic speakers, including moving the public-comment segment elsewhere on the agenda or setting a cutoff time for Zoom testimony.
Another tactic involves warning speakers to keep their remarks to subject matter within the town’s purview lest they find their microphone turned off, are muted on Zoom or are escorted out of a meeting, staff said in its report.
Walter Robinson, a city Parks and Recreation Committee member speaking as a resident over Zoom, noted that even though he came down with COVID-19 he was still able to participate and share his comments in Wednesday’s council meeting because the remote technology remained available.
“So thank you for letting me speak this way,” Robinson said. “I’m an example. I was able to participate where I can’t otherwise.”
He encouraged the town to continue with that remote option to allow for many perspectives. “So we really know the views of what’s going on with other people,” he said. Just because other places have suspended Zoom comments, “we don’t need to give up.”
Vice Mayor Diana Hawkins-Manuelian agreed, saying, “I don’t want to give up the people’s right to get on and talk.”
Until the hate-laden disruptions are “happening at every meeting,” she said, doing away with Zoom as a venue to communicate with the council “is way too big a hammer to hit.”
She would want the town to try preventative or deterrent measures first, the vice mayor said.
Zoom bombings have challenged local governmental agencies nationwide on how to combat derogatory speech coming in remotely and anonymously while still abiding by state and federal laws to allow public participation and comments.
The online speech attacks have persisted after public entities turned to video conferencing as a way to conduct meetings safely amid the height of the pandemic and then continued using the technology to expand community discourse.
