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

narcissistic personality disorder

[Martin S.]

Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a personality disorder with a long-term pattern of abnormal behavior characterized by exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a lack of empathy. 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. The behavior typically begins by early adulthood, and occurs across a variety of social situations.

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

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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

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: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

[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.