A Muslim woman who believed she was being suppressed by YouTube and told her family members she “hated” the company opened fire at YouTube’s headquarters in California, wounding three people before taking her own life, police said. Once information on the killer came out, though, CNN went totally silent.
Critics say it’s because the killer didn’t fit their narrative. Nasim Aghdam was an alt-left animal rights activist and outspoken Muslim who believed the company was silencing her.
Investigators do not believe Nasim Aghdam specifically targeted the three victims when she pulled out a handgun and fired off several rounds in a courtyard at the company’s headquarters south of San Francisco on Tuesday, police said. Instead, the shooting seems to have been a random act of terror.
A website in that name decried YouTube’s policies and said the company was trying to “suppress” content creators.
“Youtube filtered my channels to keep them from getting views!” one of the messages on the site said. “There is no equal growth opportunity on YOUTUBE or any other video sharing site, your channel will grow if they want to!!!!!”
Aghdam “hated” YouTube and was angry that the company stopped paying her for videos she posted on the platform, her father, Ismail Aghdam, told The Bay Area News.
On Monday, he called police to report his daughter missing after she didn’t answer the phone for two days and warned officers that she might go to YouTube, he said.
Officers in Mountain View — about 30 miles from YouTube’s headquarters — found her sleeping in her car in a parking lot around 2 a.m. Tuesday but let her go after she refused to answer their questions. Aghdam didn’t appear to be a threat to herself or others at the time, police spokeswoman Katie Nelson said.
Nelson would not say whether officers had been warned that Aghdam might have been headed to YouTube headquarters.
Many Twitter users quickly pointed out that the mainstream media was using this shooting to push their own liberal agenda. They misrepresented the shooting as a domestic dispute and originally claimed that it was a girlfriend killing her boyfriend. When the facts came out that this was an alt-left terrorist, they went very quiet.
Here’s how social media users reacted —
https://twitter.com/RealJack/status/981377080817528832
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/981358160144404480
So Nasim Aghdam was a PETA activist, it appears. Just imagine what media would be doing if she was instead featured at a pro-NRA rally. Will the media demand PETA denounces her violence? Will they ask what is it about PETA that drives people to violence?https://t.co/lzpWyYYlwj
— Jordan Schachtel @ dossier.today (@JordanSchachtel) April 4, 2018
One of the victims — a 36-year-old man — was in critical condition, a spokesman for San Francisco General Hospital said. A 32-year-old woman was in serious condition and a 27-year-old woman in fair condition, the spokesman said.
YouTube employee Dianna Arnspiger said she was on the building’s second floor when she heard gunshots, ran to a window and saw the shooter on a patio outside.
“It was a woman and she was firing her gun. And I just said, ‘Shooter,’ and everybody started running,” Arnspiger said.
She and others hid in a conference room for an hour while another employee repeatedly called 911 for updates.
The world’s biggest online video website is owned by Silicon Valley giant Google. The headquarters has more than a thousand engineers and other employees in several buildings. Originally built in the late 1990s for the clothing retailer Gap, the campus south of San Francisco is known for its sloped green roof of native grasses.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.