Over the past hours, YouTube once again appeared in news outlets worldwide, not because of a scandal with its algorithms or executives, but due to a serious incident involving a youtuber. Tired of what she perceived as censorship and the demonetization of her videos, vegan activist Nasim Aghdam traveled 800 kilometers from her home in San Diego to San Bruno to enter YouTube's headquarters. There she opened fire, wounding three people, and then took her own life. Both Aghdam's official YouTube profile and her content have been removed, but other youtubers with access to backups and old cached copies are uploading them again.
Vegan activist, staunch animal rights advocate, bodybuilder, experimental artist... these are some of the terms used to describe Nasim Aghdam, better known as 'Green Nasim' in Iran. In that country, she had a significant number of followers, admired and ridiculed at the same time for the extravagance of her content. In recent months, however, she adopted a much more belligerent stance toward YouTube, openly accusing the platform of demonetizing her previous videos and censoring her most recent ones. Aghdam's fury reached a critical mass when she entered the YouTube campus, where she opened fire with a 9mm semiautomatic weapon that authorities say she had legally acquired.
Note from the editor: Click on the images to access the few videos that remain available.
Investigators indicated that police found Aghdam in Mountain View sleeping in her car eleven hours before the shooting. When they checked the license plates, they discovered that the youtuber had been reported as 'missing' by her family several days earlier. Aghdam told officers she had some differences with her family and was in the area looking for work. Seeing that she was not in danger and not there against her will, the officers simply notified the family and let her go. It was her father who warned that YouTube 'had done something' that angered her, though he never anticipated the possibility of a violent act. On the morning of Tuesday, April 3, Aghdam visited a shooting range, and during midday she went to YouTube headquarters, firing her weapon at a group of employees who were having lunch. Three of them were injured, and one remains in critical condition.
Aghdam's profiles on YouTube (four channels), Instagram, and Facebook were deleted within hours (as was her official page), but the web always moves a little faster. Some of her videos are still there; however, we must acknowledge that they could disappear at any moment.
EDIT: The Internet Archive preserves a copy of Aghdam's official page (where we can see that her conflict with YouTube dates back to 2016), as well as part of her Instagram profile.
Source: CNN
