Does Zoom allow teachers to hear muted students? Fact Check

A rumour claims that video conferencing app Zoom has a feature that allows teachers to secretly unmute students in order to hear what they are saying.

FALSE

The rumour, which has been spreading on social media sites such as TikTok, claims that teachers can unmute students, while from the student’s perspective they still appear to be muted.

However there is nothing to suggest this is possible on Zoom, and our own investigation using both the Zoom app and the desktop version of the program failed to replicate the assertions made by those spreading this claim.

Zoom claim in their Help Center –

Due to privacy and security reasons, the host cannot unmute other participants without their consent.

The same help center article stipulates two methods where a participant in a meeting can be unmuted. One, by being asked to unmute by the host, whereby a participant agrees by clicking a button. Or two, by being asked before a scheduled meeting begins to provide consent for the host to unmute them automatically (consent that can be revoked at any point during the meeting.)

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In both scenarios the participants gives consent to be unmuted, either before the meeting begins or on an ad hoc basis. In neither scenario can the participant be unmuted while still under the false impression that they are still on mute. Such a scenario, if it were genuine, would likely face significant backlash from privacy activists since the feature would hinge on deliberately misleading Zoom participants into believing they could not be heard when that was in fact not the case, which would be considered a significant privacy invasion.

We asked Zoom support whether they offer any feature or special subscription designed for teachers that could allow someone to be surreptitiously unmuted by the video host, and were told, perhaps rather generically, that this is “not a functionality that Zoom currently offers“.

Given that Zoom have denied the claims and that we – or others investigating the claims – can replicate the scenario, we rank this claim as false.