YouTube HQ Shooter Angry Over Filtering and Demonetization, According to Investigation
The YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California came under weapons fire on Tuesday, April 3, which resulted in three injuries and one death. The deceased woman who allegedly opened fire before killing herself was furious over the company stopping her video revenue, according to investigators.
Nasim Najagi Aghdam, the deceased Iranian-born woman who vlogged about living in the world that's rife with "injustice and diseases," was identified by California police as the one behind the incident, according to The Guardian.
Aghdam has earlier vented online about perceived injustices, with one of them being posted on her YouTube account before her channel was deleted, according to Reuters. In an English language clip, she railed on the company for the way her account was handled.
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"I am being discriminated. I am being filtered on YouTube," Aghdam said in her video post. These and other pieces of evidence have now led police investigators to look into her possible motives behind the shooting.
"We know that she was upset with YouTube ... that's the motivation," San Bruno Police Chief Ed Barberini said as he addressed the media a day after the incident. She was earlier apprehended by Mountain View police a few miles from Alphabet's office complex, where the YouTube headquarters was located.
Aghdam was "calm and cooperative" as she faced the officers that time, giving no indication of her reason for going there or mentioning YouTube at all. According to the police, their officers had looked up and talked to her family after finding her sleeping in her car.
At first, her father did not indicate that Aghdam would have a reason to harm anybody. A while later, though, the father called back to let officers know that his daughter posted health and vegan videos on YouTube, and was apparently furious at a recent update to her account.
"At no point did her father or brother mention anything about potential acts of violence," the police statement continued.
According to initial investigations, Aghdam went through the YouTube headquarters' parking garage and then into the open-air plaza inside the complex. Upon reaching the open area, it was there that she opened fire and injured three persons, before allegedly turning her weapon on herself.
She was not able to step into the main YouTube building itself, as the company noted in a statement. YouTube has committed that it will be "revisiting this incident in detail," and the company will also be tightening security at all its offices in the US and abroad.
In her online postings, Aghdam had complained that some of her videos, which showed her demonstrating some exercise techniques, were allegedly flagged as adults-only content which may have lost her ad revenue.
"I think I am doing a great job, I have never fallen in love and have never got married. I have no physical and psychological diseases," she wrote in her Instagram post in Persian.
"But I live on a planet that is full of injustice and diseases," she concluded.
