Modesto, Ceres silence Zoom after hate speech comments at council meetings
Hate came to the Modesto and Ceres city council meetings last week via Zoom.
Modesto Mayor Sue Zwahlen stopped public comment over Zoom after three men had spoken. Ceres Mayor Javier Lopez ended public comment after two men had spoken. The comments were racist, including the use of the n-word, anti-Semitic and bigoted.
Both cities allowed in-person public comment at the meetings.
Zwahlen warned each speaker several times before directing a city official to remove them one by one from Zoom. The mayor then closed public comment over Zoom and the council took a 10-minute break.
The mayor read this statement when the meeting resumed: “I’m sorry the public had to experience the comments provided under Zoom tonight. Those comments continued to raise repetitious and irrelevant statements not within the subject matter jurisdiction of the council. The comments interfered with the orderly conduct of the meeting and kept the business of the city from being completed.”
Lopez said the two speakers at his meeting were not conforming to the meeting’s decorum. He said he directed a city official to mute the first speaker as soon as he launched into his rant.
He said the second man started with remarks typical of public comment before veering off and ending with the use of a racial slur.
What occurred last week is not uncommon. It has happened this year at local government meetings in the Bay Area, Southern California, the Sacramento region and across the nation.
In respect of First Amendment rights, some elected officials give the speakers their allotted time despite the odious content of their remarks, while officials in other jurisdictions silence them.
“The mere fact that someone is engaging in hateful speech is not enough to cut them off, as long as they stay within the subject matter jurisdiction of the government agency,” said David Loy, legal director for the Bay Area-based First Amendment Coalition.
He said letting government decide what speech is acceptable leads to censorship. But Loy said determining whether someone is speaking within an agency’s subject matter jurisdiction is not an easy question to answer.
Loy added that ending public comment prevented others who wanted to address their city over Zoom. At Modesto meetings that can include affordable housing, policing in the city and the city’s response to homelessness.
He said Modesto council members have the right to respond to what members of the public say. And after the council break, the mayor and council members expressed their disapproval — and in one case disgust — with the three men’s remarks.
No more comments, questions by Zoom
Zoom became popular during the pandemic. While California city councils, school boards, boards of supervisors and similar local governing bodies no longer are required by state law to use it except in some rare circumstances, some have continued the practice as they meet in person.
City spokeswoman Diana Ruiz-Del Re said Modesto will continue to use Zoom for its council and other public meetings for the rest of the year but will not allow the public to use it to comment or ask questions. The city will evaluate other options for next year.
Ruiz-Del Re said the city uses Zoom as the platform for Wordly, the software program that provides real-time closed-caption transcriptions of meetings in more than two dozen languages, including Spanish, Tagalog, Arabic and Chinese.
The Oct. 9 Ceres Council meeting will be available on Zoom, Lopez said, but people will not be able to use it to speak.
He said the council will discuss then whether to keep Zoom as part of a bigger discussion of updating the council’s procedures, a discussion that was postponed from a couple of months ago.
Lopez said he believes the two men who spoke during the Ceres’ Sept. 25 council meeting were outsiders and part of the same group that spoke at Modesto’s Sept. 26 council meeting.
He said one clue they were not locals is that their comments to the Ceres council were anti-Semitic and anti-Black. Lopez said they apparently did not know that Latinos make up the majority of his city’s residents.
Lopez alerted Zwahlen and Riverbank Councilwoman Rachel Hernandez about what had happened at his meeting. The two other councils met the next day. Riverbank was not hit by Zoom-bombers.
This story was originally published October 3, 2023 at 5:30 PM.
