NAHANT — The Board of Selectmen meeting on Zoom was running smoothly on Wednesday evening until it was hijacked by an unknown individual, who tossed up a flurry of lewd acts onto people’s screens.
The board was busy going through items on the meeting agenda as it normally does, when a person, who remains anonymous, joined the meeting a half-hour late. He sat there quietly, wearing headphones and looking at his computer/monitor for a moment.
Then, lewd images and videos were plastered across the entire Zoom meeting, which left the attendees and the Selectmen in a state of confusion. The chaos lasted for a few seconds, before he was forcefully removed from the meeting. After that, he rejoined and began the whole act all over again.
Chairman Joshua A. Antrim elaborated on the incident. “It is difficult to prevent this type of Zoom hacking (sometimes called Zoom bombing) in open public meetings. The Nahant BOS had this happen once before when we first moved to Zoom at the start of the pandemic,” he said. “Since then, we haven’t had any issues until this week. However, we will be reviewing procedure in attempt to prevent future occurrences.
“It is unfortunate that people engage in this pointless and disturbing behavior, which can be quite upsetting to people who are just trying to be part of an important public process,” he added. “Nahant Board of Selectmen are pleased that citizens can join our open meetings via Zoom. We certainly hope that this can continue without this kind of upsetting occurrence.”
