On Tuesday, April 3, a woman entered the YouTube office in San Bruno, CA, and proceeded to open fire on several employees before turning the weapon on herself. Aside from the shooter, there were no casualties and those who were injured received medical attention promptly, but the event still shook everyone involved as well as the YouTube community at large, resulting in the incident being viewed in many different ways.
For many, it has become common in many of these situations, the immediate reaction is to focus on the lack of security present at Google-owned headquarters like this. Past and current employees of the Youtube office in San Bruno and others admitted to seeing people walk in behind someone with a badge without being questioned by anyone. It is often assumed that these are just other employees that didn’t feel the need to show a badge, but it is worth noting that the shooter in this instance allegedly entered into the building by this very same tactic. Others blame the easy access to guns because it is already a hotly debated issue.
But the shooter herself, Nasim Aghdam, would say that her actions were the result of her raging against the censorship as a result of YouTube’s demonetization spree. Seeming to have internalized criticisms of the site and its policies put forward by another YouTuber, Casey Neistat, in 2016.
“[She] was upset with the policies and practices of YouTube,” police say after reviewing Aghdam’s personal website and that, “this anger appears to be the motive for this incident.”
It must be stated that what Agham took to be the message of Neistat’s video was very different from its actual meaning. Where Neistat’s video addressed the problem of censorship and unfair treatment of videos of some topics, her solution was to adjust the system or policies to allow everyone, content creators and YouTube, to work better together. By contrast, Aghdam appears to have taken the idea that YouTube may have been censoring content as a personal attack leading her to her recent actions.
Aghdam is known to have operated at least four separate channels on the YouTube in multiple languages in which she discussed a broad range of topics from animal rights, hand art, exercise, and veganism. The last of these, according to her website, appears to have been the source of Aghdam’s major gripe with Youtube.
For some time leading up to the shooting she was seen to have put out several posts, both on her website and social media, expressing growing frustration and anger toward Youtube, saying that they were discriminating against her because her content based on veganism and healthy living was not in line with the goals of “big businesses.” The videos in question, which were apparently age restricted and therefore led to fewer views overall for Aghdam, can no longer be found on YouTube.
Aghdam’s actions have caused many other prominent YouTubers to take down their own videos criticizing the policies put in place by the site as a sign of respect and solidarity. It, unfortunately, would not be surprising if in the near future someone puts forward a conspiracy theory of sorts saying that this tragic shooting was somehow a ploy on the part of Google to make people more willingly accept the policies on which the shooter’s own conspiracy theory was based on. This would not be entirely out of the realm of possibility as some on the internet have begun making similar claims about other recent shootings.
More than anything, the vast majority of people are shocked that something as minor as unfair treatment of internet content could result in such a violent act. But now it has. Only time will tell what this will mean for YouTube.
