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

And?

[fredgiblet]

Is this surprising at all? I'm sure that random death threats have been getting lobbed around since antiquity. It's just easier now.

News at eleven

[Gaygirlie]

Unstable people with real need for professional help sometimes end up harming themselves and other people when given easy access to guns.

Re:News at eleven

[Train0987]

An inanimate object didn't kill those people, a crazy person did. If guns didn't exist she would have used something else. That's what crazy people do.

But please, keep blaming the inanimate object.

Re:News at eleven

[hipp5]

Yeahhhh, except guns are designed for the efficient killing of people. Sure, you can kill people with a shot glass full of water, but it's not like it's going to be easy. There are very few efficient killing machines to which we give people access, other than guns.

Re:News at eleven

[Train0987]

A car can kill more people than a gun can. Faster too.

Re:News at eleven

[gnick]

If guns didn't exist she would have used something else.

You sound very convinced of that. I'm not. How do you know what she would have done without a gun? The gun didn't cause her to become violent, but it made it easier. And the "something else" she might have used would likely have been less effective than a pistol.

Re:News at eleven

[Anonymous Coward]

This like the comment above show a shocking level of self delusion and purposeful ignorance. Guns are designed to kill things (sometimes people). Guns are the the most recent design of a very long evolution of tools of war and tools of hunting, designed to kill your target. To deny this is to ignore the very long history of firearms.

Re:News at eleven

[GameboyRMH]

Well guns are downright shitty at propelling objects at great velocities. A particle accelerator, low-bypass afterburning turbofan, or rocket engine would do far better jobs, depending on the size of the object and how long you want it to go fast. So why the fuck are people using guns for propelling their objects? They only apply thrust/acceleration for a tiny fraction of a second to very specific small objects and the top speeds are garbage.

But the gun makes perfect sense as a purpose-built deadly weapon, isn't that odd? The projectile is ideally sized for killing people and smaller animals, the range makes sense for use by a human, the speed is decent, it's as if that was its intended purpose throughout history!

Cars on the other hand are downright shitty weapons. They're designed, to the greatest practical extent, not to kill. They tend to break on impact. Newer ones will stop by themselves if you attempt to drive them into a person or vehicle. You have to attack a dense crowd of people with a vehicle the size of a small house to cause deaths in the same league as a gun could.

Re:News at eleven

[AmiMoJo]

An object that just happens to be perfectly shaped for penetrating the human body and causing fatal injuries.

Re:narcissistic personality disorder

[DickBreath]

For a second there I thought you were describing the president.

YouTube treats their creators like shit

[MSTCrow5429]

YT randomly changes policies, which are always vaguely written policies. It's impossible for creators to contact YT for help with arbitrarily (and often wrongly) applied policies. Many otherwise successful moneymakers, for YT first and foremost, suddenly and without warning are thrown under the bus. I've never been a creator, but how many people does YT have to screw over before they screw over the wrong person?

Re:YouTube treats their creators like shit

[eaglesrule]

I hope YT continues to screw over content creators. The best thing that could happen would be if that SJW feminist CEO Susan Wojcicki, who is worth nearly half a billion dollars as she cheats content producers out of income, drops policy bombs until there is a mass revolt.

It isn't that I want to see such a marvel of a marketplace of ideas burn; it would just be preferable to a death by a thousand cuts in having the producers disperse. A new platform that protects free speech, that promotes content fairly, and is not capricious in dealing with content producers is required. I would gladly pay to access that.

Unless she was a highly trained ninja

[rsilvergun]

Or an explosives expert she probably would have done less damage. Contrary to what the internet would have you believe handling explosives isn't as easy as you think. Especially for crazy people. And a 120lb woman with a knife just isn't a threat.

Like everything else, guns are best when they're legal, taxed and regulated. We got the first two, it's time for #3.

Re:narcissistic personality disorder

[cayenne8]

I still find it VERY interesting, that this story dropped off the face of the earth (ok, at least the mainstream news) so rapidly....especially since it hit a major company with such a public face, YouTube / Google.

I have to think it had something to do with the facts that this gun killing crime didn't fit with the parameters that the left considers more beneficial to their agenda to get rid of guns and enact more gun control.

I guess it was inconvenient that the shooter:

1. Was female

2. Was a foreigner, or at the very least, was not a white guy.

3. Was a handgun, and not a scary looking black semi-automtic rifle. Nope, a semi-automatic handgun just isn't as scary, so not wanting to press that in the news.

But still...people were killed, and yet....well, we had no marches, no politicians screaming "think of the children", and calling legal gun owners murderers, or trying to vilify the NRA (which by the way, is made up of and funded by gun owning US citizens, it isn't a faceless evil corporation).....

Funny isn't it? I think it was news worthy what...maybe 2 days tops?

Re:narcissistic personality disorder

[Quirkz]

no politicians screaming "think of the children"

Maybe because no children were killed in this particular incident?

Re:narcissistic personality disorder

[bws111]

Yep, same thing with the Maryland school shooting that happened a couple of weeks ago.

1. Handgun
2. Shooter had it illegally, so 'background checks' and 'age limits', etc would not help at all
3. Shooter taken out by armed security

That one disappeared REAL fast

Re:narcissistic personality disorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe because on average there's over 90 gun deaths in the US per day it's not particularly newsworthy (https://everytownresearch.org/gun-violence-by-the-numbers/#DailyDeaths)? If it didn't happen at Youtube, who would even care? There's no need to jump to conspiracy theory.

Re:narcissistic personality disorder

[Dare nMc]

This was a single death with a gun, only the shooter dead, practically a suicide. Their are 60 suicides by gun a day in the us, around 30 homicides a day with guns.

How loud and for how long do you expect the "liberals" to drag out each of these 90 deaths a day?

Honestly in a case like this, that doesn't fit the mold and results in a single death, their is little to gain by attempting to address it, and publicizing it makes repeats more likely. When you have 90 deaths a day by guns in the US, and less than 15% of them are by woman, even lower rates by foreigners, much more is to be gained by society to not focus on this unusual situation.

If anything I am a little surprised no news media focused on how California's laws, making it so much more difficult to get semi-automatics rifles and big clips... may have reduced the impact of this crime, could even have something to do with California being 42nd out of the 50 states in gun homicide rate. And how they have much better reporting of the mentally ill... already makes mass death situations like that one in Florida and one in Nevada less likely. They could have used this one to point out these things again, but maybe all the media are not all a bunch of liberals looking for any reason to vilify those on the right.

Re:narcissistic personality disorder

[SvnLyrBrto]

Nope. It's remained in the news, as the story has developed. The police released the body camera footage from their earlier encounter with her a few days ago... that made the Friday news. And just this morning, there was a segment on KCBS about possible possible security changes at company campuses as as result of the shooting. But hey... carry on... and don't let a little thing like facts get in the way of your narrative.

Re:narcissistic personality disorder

[serviscope_minor]

Funny isn't it? I think it was news worthy what...maybe 2 days tops?

Hahaha yes, funny!

I mean it must be a liberal consipracy to do something. Of course if it was in the news for longer it would be a liberal conspiracy to take your guns. Either way it must be a liberal conspiracy.