The 2025 Zach Latdroid Incidents refer to the circulation of two distinct satirical videos posted under or in reference to the sock puppet account name "Zach Latdroid" within the Hack Club community in October 2025.
On 11 October 2025, a user account named "Zach Latdroid" posted a video to the Hack Club Slack workspace. The video was a critical montage of the organization's culture and operations. The name is a portmanteau of Hack Club founder Zach Latta and the word "droid."
The video was an edited montage using various clips and images to convey its critique. Its content included:
- Opening Segment: The video began with a clip from a Y2K-era presentation by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. The clip was edited to feature the Hack Club flag on Ballmer's person, with logos for the Musk Foundation and GitHub Education superimposed. Ballmer's exclamation, "I love this company!" was presented as a commentary on Hack Club's perceived corporate culture.
- Audience Scene: A segment showed an audience raising their hands in a uniform manner, accompanied by the sound of a Slack notification. A later, censored version of the video replaced this scene with a error message for an inappropriate username, which was interpreted by some viewers as comparing Hack Club's administration to a dictatorship.
- Internal Mockery: The video included a screenshot of an interaction in a Slack channel, purportedly showing a member of the "Fraud Department" and another user exchanging the onomatopoeia "meow."
- Puppetmaster Imagery: An edited image depicted a figure labeled as the CEO with a partially robotic face (so-called "Zach Latdroid"), with strings attached to the profile pictures of users with cat avatars. This was seen as an implication that the leadership exerts control over a segment of the community.
- Critique of Operations: The montage featured a selection of posts from Confessions and referenced the 2023 pay rate of $12.50 per hour for certain HCB roles. It also included footage of someone rapidly editing event planning documents for various Hack Club programs (e.g., Power Hour, Arcade, Summer of Making), altering only minor details, to suggest a repetitive event model.
- AI and Corporate Allegiance: A segment used symbolic imagery, including a pyramid structure and corporate logos (GitHub, Microsoft, Slack), to critique the organization's relationship with Github, Microsoft and use of artificial intelligence.
- Named Shout-outs: The video concluded by displaying the usernames of four individuals within the Hack Club community.
¶ Aftermath and Response
The video received mixed reactions from Hack Clubbers. Some users referred to it as the “neo-nazi edit” due to its imagery and controversial symbols. The sock puppet account was subsequently banned by the Fire Department and its username was changed to "(redacted)".
The purported video creator later posted a statement via Prox2, clarifying that the video was intended as a parody comparing Hack Club to a dictatorship in the opening segment and that certain elements were placeholders or references to internet memes.
On 16 October 2025, a second video related to the incident was posted. Unlike the first, this video did not use the sock puppet account but directly referenced the "Cyborg Zack Latdroid" persona.
The second video was a highly stylized and fast-paced musical montage that further exaggerated the corporate critique:
- Opening Montage: The video featured a grid of people in a Zoom-style call, interspersed with logos for EasyEDA, Salesforce, Ubuntu Snap, and an old Microsoft logo, as well as the meme image of Elon Musk smoking. A robotic voice read "Cyborg Zach Latdroid from GitHub successfully brainwashed hundreds of kids with an Airtable back door in Figma"
- "Resignation" Clip: A screenshot, presented in a futuristic AR/VR interface, showed a message from a user announcing their resgination from Hard Fork and wishing the organization well, while featuring the Cyborg Zach Latdroid persona in the foreground.
- Hack Club References: The video included numerous clips of the Cyborg Zack Latdroid figure dancing or standing in front of real Hack Club-related media, including:
- Slack posts and newsheadlines about the organization being "extored" by Salesforce
- Footage from a Hack Club presentation at the Ubuntu Summit.
- A clip from CBS News Bay Area featuring Hack Club.