YouTube Shooter’s Family May Have Revealed the Motive Behind the Shooting
(ANTIMEDIA) — YouTube headquarters is the latest backdrop of yet another shooting in the United States, and while the shooter’s exact motive has not yet been identified, her father disclosed her anger toward the company in an interview with the Bay Area News Group Tuesday evening.
Mercury News, a subsidiary of the news organization, detailed the interview, noting that Nasim Aghdam, 38, was a YouTuber who was disgruntled at the company’s recent policy changes, according to her father, Ismail Aghdam.
In the interview, he reportedly said she recently told the family that “YouTube had been censoring her videos and stopped paying her for her content,” the outlet summarized. “She was angry,” he said during the interview, conducted at his home in Riverside County.
Nasim Aghdam posted videos about veganism, animal rights, and the environment, as well as workout videos, and had begun complaining that Youtube was unfairly deeming her videos ineligible for advertising revenue in a policy dubbed “demonetization.”
“I’m being discriminated and filtered on YouTube and I’m not the only one,” she reportedly said in one post. Her social media accounts were taken down after the shooting, where she killed herself with a pistol after injuring three people.
This has been a common complaint among many content creators on the platform.
“She was always complaining that YouTube ruined her life,” her brother Shahran, also present for the interview, said.
Ismail told NBC News in a phone interview that she complained the company had “stopped everything and now she has no income.”
Nasim Aghdam, who moved from Iran to the United States with her family in 1996, was living with her grandmother in San Diego. Ismail says that when she went missing over the weekend, he called the police and indicated she might be heading to YouTube headquarters, located in Northern California, because she “hated” the company.
Mountain View Police, located in Silicon Valley, found her sleeping in her car and reportedly determined she was not a threat to herself and others. Mercury News noted that as of Tuesday evening, it “wasn’t clear…what Mountain View police knew about her history with YouTube.”
Shahran told the Bay Area News Group that “when he learned his sister was in Mountain View, he Googled the city and found out it was near YouTube headquarters. He said he called the Mountain View police, who found her and reported back that she was fine, and they would keep an eye on her.”
Though a law enforcement source previously said investigators were looking into the possibility that she was targeting a boyfriend, San Bruno Police indicated Wednesday this was not the case. “At this time there is no evidence that the shooter knew the victims of this shooting or that individuals were specifically targeted,” a press release said.
A police press conference Wednesday morning appeared to confirm the family’s suspicions. “At this point in the investigation it is believed that the suspect was upset with the policies and practices of YouTube. This appears to be the motive for this incident,” said San Bruno Police Chief Ed Barberini.
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