Just yesterday, YouTube’s headquarters in Northern California was in chaos as a female suspect shot at three of the company’s employees before going on to commit suicide. The female suspect has since been identified to be Nasim Najafi Aghdam. Surprisingly, Nasim was a high profile YouTuber.
A strong animal rights activist, the Iranian-American created and posted videos in English, Turkish and Farsi. While many of Nasim’s videos dealt with animal abuse issues, she also shared videos where she was simply working out.
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While her Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages are no longer available, her website is still up and running. In the days leading to her shootout and suicide, Nasim’s relationship with the platform that allowed her to share with the world began to turn sour.
According to Nasim’s father, she began to resent YouTube when the platform started to restrain her from monetizing her content. As a result, Nasim started to make videos expressing her anger towards YouTube’s censorship as she felt she was being bullied by the site.
Here’s what the homepage of her site says:
‘BE AWARE! Dictatorship exists in all countries but with different tactics! They only care for personal short term profits & do anything to reach their goals even by fooling simple-minded people, hiding the truth, manipulating science & everything, putting public mental & physical health at risk, abusing non-human animals, polluting environment, destroying family values, promoting materialism & sexual degeneration in the name of freedom,….. & turning people into programmed robots! “Make the lie big, Make it simple, Keep saying it, And eventually they will believe it” Adolf Hitler… There is no free speech in real world & you will be suppressed for telling the truth that is not supported by the system. Videos of targeted users are filtered & merely relegated so that people can hardly see their videos! There is no equal growth opportunity on YOUTUBE or any other video sharing site, your channel will grow if they want to!!!!!’
She also shared what appears to be proof that YouTube was demonetizing her videos.
Nasim is not the first YouTuber to face problems with YouTube’s opaque demonetization policies. Demonetization is what happens to a YouTube channel when the platform’s algorithms find the content of a particular channel to be inappropriate or in violation of their rules and regulations.
Police investigations so far have revealed that Nasim was reported missing by her family on March 31st. The shooter’s brother told authorities that her family hadn’t heard from her in a while so when they visited her and found out she was missing, they alerted the authorities. According to Nasim’s brother, he made the police aware of the fact that she was probably up to something violent.
Here’s what he said:
‘She had a problem with YouTube…
We called the cop and told them there’s a reason she went from San Diego to that, so she might do something.
I didn’t know she had a gun. I didn’t know she’d start a fight.
The cop told us they’d keep an eye on her
After 12 hours the shooting happened.
She got killed, the other 3 people got hurt.
I did my best to avoid it but looks like cop didn’t do their job.’
Nasim would have turned 38 today.