Employees Who Worked at YouTube Say Violent Threats From Volatile 'Creators' Have Been Going on For Years (businessinsider.com)

Anonymous readers share a report: YouTube managers had no way to predict Nasim Aghdam would go on a bloody rampage, but they had plenty of reasons to fear that someone like her might one day show up, say former employees. Aghdam was the 38-year-old, disgruntled YouTube video creator who arrived at the company's San Bruno, California, headquarters on April 3 and began blasting away with a 9mm handgun. She wounded three staffers before she killed herself. Police say leading up to the shooting Aghdam, who was from San Diego, believed YouTube sought to censor her and ruin her life.

This kind of violence is unprecedented in YouTube's 13-year-history, though Aghdam's anger and paranoia aren't unique among the millions of people who create and post videos to the site, according to five former YouTube employees. In exclusive interviews, they told Business Insider that going back to the service's earliest days, frustrated creators -- seething over one of YouTube's policy changes or the other -- have threatened staffers with violence. Typically the threats were delivered via email. At least once, a video creator confronted a YouTube employee face-to-face and promised he would "destroy" him.

Comments

Re:News at eleven

[ArchieBunker]

Shooting is considered a sport and even part of the olympics. My guns haven't killed anyone but oddly enough Ted Kennedy's car has a body count.

Re:narcissistic personality disorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting as AC due to being long-time-reader, and probably my second post in 20 years. Your facts are off. Not that I see any connection between the Maryland shooting in St. Mary's and the Youtube shooting, but I can't help myself because you're wrong on the internet. There's an XKCD for that.

I live in the next County over and have been following this unusually closely just because it's local. So let's go:

1. Handgun. Yes. A Glock 9mm, I assume a Glock 19. If I'm not mistaken, such handguns are legally limited to a 10-round magazine in Maryland. I'm not certain because I haven't looked into owning a gun in this state. I'm a transplant from Virginia and am a gun owner. But my current circumstances preclude me from keeping a firearm of any sort in my home. I have seen no reports that the shooter had more than one magazine in possession, so that indicates a maximum possible load of 11 rounds.

2. Shooter had it illegally. Technically, yes. In the sense that a 14-year-old drives a parent's car illegally. He was not of legal age to purchase or own a firearm of any sort in the State of Maryland. The Glock in question was his father's, who I assume did own it legally. But he couldn't be bothered to secure it in a gun safe, it was subsequently acquired by the shooter, and here we are.

3. Shooter taken out by armed security. This is a false statement. The shooter shot his girlfriend (or perhaps recently ex-girlfriend). He then shot himself. The "armed security" you speak of was a school resource officer who happened to be unusually close by. The resource officer shot the shooter simultaneously. This was widely reported in the media as an example of good guys with guns ending bad guys with guns. Several days later the coroner's report came out and it stated that the shooter's fatal bullet was his own, not the resource officer's.

This was not a "school shooting" in the traditional sense. This was an incident of domestic violence. The people involved were high school age so it's reasonable to conjecture that any such domestic violence, involving guns or not, is likely to happen at school. Had they been ten years older it would have happened at home or at work. Had he been slightly less homicidal, he would have beaten her at school. Having been at Virginia Tech in April of 2007, please refrain from accusing me of splitting hairs. I know what a mass shooting at school looks like in some detail. This is not that.

From the available evidence that I've read (mostly from local, rural, moderately conservative-leaning media) there is no indication that the shooter intended to shoot anyone other than his girlfriend and himself. Since the coroner's report states that the fatal bullet was his own, the combination of these two facts yields the result that the resource officer's actions (actions I support, for the record) led to no difference in outcome.

Now the real conjecture comes. There's no evidence that I've read to substantiate the notion that this was in play here. But statistically, most domestic violence is a learned behaviour. Most domestic abusers are so because they saw a parent being a domestic abuser. Dollars to donuts, this kid saw that gun aimed by his father at his mother at least once. Mass shootings are perpetrated by someone completed different. Stephen Cho was deeply unhinged, for sure, but I very much doubt he saw one of his parents kill thirty-some unarmed civilians.

Re:narcissistic personality disorder

[MrKaos]

Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a personality disorder

I've been writing a book on this subject and the impact of the psychological abuse from NPD. One abusive parent is required and one fawning parent who feels guilty about the abuse and tries to compensate.

with a long-term pattern of abnormal behavior characterized by exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration,

Also entitlement and imposing their emotional needs onto you via psychological manipulation.

and a lack of empathy.

I have to clear this bit up because it's important, especially if you don't want to become a victim. Empathy's traditional meaning is an awareness of other peoples feeling. Somehow, in the modern vernacular, it has been attached to compassion for other peoples feelings.

To be clear, narcissists do have empathy, however they way they use it to manipulate people better so they can secure narcissistic supply.

People affected by it often spend a lot of time thinking about achieving power or success, or about their appearance. They often take advantage of the people around them.

Thinking about it, but rarely achieving it. To be clear, narcissists are losers. They aren't talented enough at anything to be able to get what they want because they are so preoccupied manipulating people around them to get the emotional validation they seek.

This is the essence of narcissistic supply and everything they do is geared around how and what they have to do to manipulate people into interacting with them that way.

It's the narcissists sense of absolute superiority that makes them unable to submit to any discipline that would make them good any anything to generate those feelings in people in a genuine way. Everything about the narcissist is their false self and maintaining the perception of it.

The behavior typically manifests by early adulthood, and occurs across a variety of social situations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The correction was necessary because they, themselves were abused over time. If you are going to feel any compassion for a narcissist feel it for when they were a child from age 3-13 when their brains were still plastic and their abusive parent conditioned them to being abused and the fawning parent told them they were special. After this age the narcissist is beyond help because they don't think anything is wrong with them and over time they will drive their victims to complete emotional breakdowns remorselessly and then discard them callously.

You have nailed it that it is those people that would attack the Youtube staffers instead of being grateful they have a platform. I'm not qualified to make a diagnosis, however the traits are there. Youtube took their narcissistic supply away from them, caused them an un-excusable narcissistic injury, they felt entitled to retribution.

What I'll point out though is narcissists are conscious of getting into trouble so this person was highly likely to be slipping over to an anti-social personality disorder. It's likely they are diagnose-able with one of these conditions.

Re: narcissistic personality disorder

[cayenne8]

If I was him, I wouldn't want the average person (i.e. user of FB) with access to automatic rifles either.

MOST Americans do not have access to automatic rifles.....they are VERY rare, and aside form having to have very special approvals and tax stamps from the BATF, you have to have the $$ to buy the limited supply of them. Cheapest goes for about $10K these days I believe.