One of the few positives to come from the Covid-19 pandemic is the expansion of public access to public meetings. Those interested in, say, the Kingston Board of Education’s affairs no longer must transport themselves to the meeting site and sit on a hard metal chair for the better part of three hours. Via YouTube, they can watch the meeting as it happens from the comfort of their own chairs. They can even pause it to use the bathroom or get a beverage. Take it from those of us who’ve been to a lot of meetings over the years — it’s a much more civilized way to participate in civic life.

Another platform used by local government to provide online access is Zoom. Rising to prominence during 2020’s lockdown, when a mix of common sense and abject terror kept almost everyone at home, Zoom’s all about people having a discussion, allowing those “at” the meeting to speak their piece during a meeting’s public participation portion.

But as the Kingston Common Council found out last month, widening the net of people who can speak at meetings sometimes hauls in some pretty rotten fish. As Jesse J. Smith reported, “A meeting of the Kingston Common Council was thrown into chaos [June 4] after multiple online participants disrupted the meeting’s public speaking portion with anti-Semitic hate speech. The outbursts occurred before a crowded Council Chamber, where dozens had turned out to speak for and against a potential memorializing resolution calling for an end to the Israeli invasion of Gaza.”

While it hadn’t been much of a problem in the past, the incident brought to the fore a flaw of having open Zoom meetings — when you leave the screen door open, anything can fly in. “We had no way to know that they were trolls until they started speaking,” Common Council President Andrea Shaut said, adding that later analysis of the data showed the offenders were not from our area.

The council is now in a pickle. How should it handle Zoom comments going forward? As going back to the status quo isn’t going to happen, and for good reason, lawmakers will have to decide how to filter and/or discourage disruption from bad actors. At last week’s meeting of the council’s Laws and Rules Committee, some ideas were considered, among them making Zoom speakers appear on camera, requiring them to register beforehand with the City Clerk’s Office, allowing Zoom comments but keeping a ready finger on the mute button, or doing away with them entirely.

Talk about your modern problems. But is there a modern solution? Can some kind of balance be struck between protecting meetings from nasty “Zoom bombing” attacks and allowing people, some of whom can’t make it to 420 Broadway in person because of legitimate health concerns, to still be heard?

Let’s consider what we have to deal with. Your Editorial Team isn’t saying that Kingston is as well-known as cities like Chicago, Seattle or even Peoria. But our involvement in the past several years with issues like Gaza, gun control and sanctuary cities, as well as our current reputation for electing socialists and our brief status as America’s hottest real estate market, has elevated the city’s profile higher than it’s ever been, at least since the 1770s. That kind of buzz put a target on us; some might say the council’s ventures into international affairs that don’t have a lot to do with Kingston opened the door for this sort of attack. In the old days (2005), white supremacist Hal Turner had to come to town in person to cause trouble. Nowadays malefactors can inflict far more harm online, partly by perverting legitimate channels of access to their own despicable and foul ends.

Considering all that, your Editorial Team understands why the best solution might be an absolute one: stop letting people comment via Zoom. There really is no other way to guarantee the complete absence of online trolls — like Hal Turner, they will have to show up in person to do their damage, which we don’t foresee happening very often, if at all.

But we’d like to see an intermediate measure or two tried first. Thinking about it a bit, we figure that the public dissemination of the Zoom call-in number or meeting link is the vital control point. That information should be prevented, as much as it is possible, from going out to the world at large. The only way to do that effectively, it seems to us, is establish a pre-registration system. That way, whoever gets the job of screening Zoom commenters can at least get some insight into who gets the link. As commenting at public meetings is a privilege and not a right, we don’t think it’s unreasonable to forbid out-of-the-region people from Zoom participation. If they feel that strongly about something, they can always send an email or, again, come to Kingston and say what they have to say at the meeting itself.

The drawback is logistics: when a hot tamale of a topic, like the Gaza ceasefire resolution, comes up before the council, screening will be a lot of work for those tasked with doing it. It’s entirely possible that the labor cost associated with screening isn’t worth it, but that’s a decision to be made down the line.

Internet access to meetings was designed to be a feature, not a bug. Before we squish it altogether, let’s see if we can find a way to make it work.