Suspected YouTube HQ shooter Nasim Aghdam dead
The story of Nasim Aghdam, who used social media to fight for justice on a planet ‘full of diseases’, seems to reveal profound alienation
Rory Carroll in Los Angeles
@rorycarroll72
Wed 4 Apr 2018 18.21 EDT First published on Wed 4 Apr 2018 17.4
She chased eyeballs on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube with homemade videos that attracted hundreds of thousands of views, yielding not just an income source but an identity.
On social media she was more than an Iranian immigrant who lived with her grandmother in southern California –she was an athlete, a fitness guru, a model, a poet, a vegan advocate, an animal rights warrior and a film-maker. She was glamorous and fought inequity. She was a star.
YouTube shooting suspect was angry site stopped paying her, father says
“I think I am doing a great job,” Aghdam wrote in a Farsi post on Instagram. “I have never fallen in love and have never got married. I have no physical and psychological diseases. But I live on a planet that is full of injustice and diseases.”
When YouTube changed its rules, Aghdam’s video views and income, like those of many other small creators, slumped – an act she apparently interpreted as censorship, betrayal and demanding retribution.
On Tuesday, after a 500-mile drive from her home near San Diego, she allegedly entered the Google-owned company’s headquarters in San Bruno, outside San Francisco, and opened fire, wounding three employees, one gravely, before taking her own life.