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Suspect in YouTube Shooting Angry That Her Videos Had Been 'De-Monetized'

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Re: Suspect in YouTube Shooting Angry That Her Videos Had Been 'De-Monetized'

#71
post #2

The media’s part in this: For whatever reason they started scouring youtube for “controversial” videos checking if they had ads (no matter how little views they had) then they would contact the advertisers for comment. Advertisers would initiate damage control and pull their ads from youtube. Youtube would explain that the numbers and views in question are insignificant and that this type of complex system can never…

21st century reporters or "journalists" as they like to be called seem to be the equivalent of schoolyard tattletales.

The death of traditional media and "news" cannot happen soon enough.

Re: Suspect in YouTube Shooting Angry That Her Videos Had Been 'De-Monetized'

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She was crazy. I don't think attempts to walk through her thought processes will bear fruit

Whenever something like this happens, people like to dismiss the situation by saying we can't possibly understand "crazy" people. It avoids having to consider the systemic reasons why something like this can happen. I'd imagine a significant part of it is that we live a society where some people can have their livelihood yanked away from them, with no support structure to help them, leaving them desperate and angry.

Yes, and the crazy people are the ones who, when desperate and angry, try to kill 3 innocent people and then themselves.

I don't understand the equivocation here. It seems a symptom of the broad inability in modern social thinking to pin any responsibility on individuals. While this stems from our desire to root out systematic issues, which is necessary and important, it should not be the only thing we care about.

In fact, a culture of individual responsibility actually can become a deep feature of our society if we take the time to engender it.

Talking about individual responsibility is not ignoring the systematic issues in society, because a lack of focus on individual responsibility is actually rooted in our culture and hence is a systemic issue in itself.

Re: Suspect in YouTube Shooting Angry That Her Videos Had Been 'De-Monetized'

#73

I don't sympathize with shooting up a company's headquarters at all, but I feel that this could have been avoided by forcing Youtube (and, for that matter, all other social networks!) to have a way to reach an actual human support. In the end, this is one of the "externalities" that get forced upon society when the big companies decide to cut corners on support. Some will... take matters into their own hands. Be it b…

Sorry but this is ridiculous. Someone decided that to respond to having video de-monetized on a website was justification for trying to kill people. How on earth is it reasonable to start down the path of 'well if she had talked to tech support...'

Tier 1 support is now supposed to dissuade lunatics from murdering people? Are we supposed to construct our society around making sure that nothing, nowhere could possibly lead to a lunatic getting upset at some decision that could inconvenience them?

Re: Suspect in YouTube Shooting Angry That Her Videos Had Been 'De-Monetized'

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely a "no-win" situation in my mind. Everyone is acting in their best interests, and in many cases are acting benevolently, but the outcome is still awful. Obviously YouTube is going to cave to advertiser pressure and start to restrict what videos can have ads, their whole existence depends on it, and if I worked at YouTube i'd see demonetizing some videos as a welcome alternative to closing the whole…

If you want to look at causes then I fear that it's not the monetization itself that's the problem but youtube's 'burned bridge' approach to communication. I've seen several people complain about the non-communicative stance YouTube has taken, leaving people with little to no ways of recourse. To me it seems likely that this person felt that this was the only way they could 'reach' YouTube.

With 50 million channels it's impossible to give quality communication to everyone, so they prioritize based on size/viewership/ad dollars. Top creators have great communications channels - nobody's don't. It's not YouTube's responsibility to stroke everyone's fragile ego.

The problem is people thinking they are more important than they are and then going to extreme lengths to make themselves relevant. That's what mass shooters are, people with egos that don't have the influence to match.

Re: Suspect in YouTube Shooting Angry That Her Videos Had Been 'De-Monetized'

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She was crazy. I don't think attempts to walk through her thought processes will bear fruit

Whenever something like this happens, people like to dismiss the situation by saying we can't possibly understand "crazy" people. It avoids having to consider the systemic reasons why something like this can happen. I'd imagine a significant part of it is that we live a society where some people can have their livelihood yanked away from them, with no support structure to help them, leaving them desperate and angry.

Absolutely it makes sense. "That person shoot out random youtube employees therefore youtube should change its helpdesk" argument does not make sense. It makes as much sense as caving to any other form of terrorism.

Youtube and its employees are the victim here. Using this to put pressure on them in the "for the safety of your employees" way is incredibly distasteful.

Re: Suspect in YouTube Shooting Angry That Her Videos Had Been 'De-Monetized'

#76
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get how that gets some channel into trouble: politics, guns. Than channel was apparently a Iranian-American vegan animal rights activist. I’m not a vegan, but I don’t see the point in opposing them. Other than the banter about how in-your-face they can be, do people violently oppose vegans, or animal rights activists? She was upset over a workout video being age-gated: who would oppose that video?

There is something very ironic about a person that is supposedly so careful about animal rights that they will change their diet to relieve the pressure who at the same time has no problems in bringing a gun into the offices of a free service and shooting random strangers.

There is sadly a small segment of animal-rights or environmental advocates who let their cause mutate into a sort of misanthropy or disregard for humans. At its mildest levels it manifests as the half-joking comments of "we don't deserve dogs" or "dogs are the best people" that are all the rage on imgur et al., at its more severe levels it becomes anger or violence against those perceived to be enabling oppression of animals seen as pure innocents.

Re: Suspect in YouTube Shooting Angry That Her Videos Had Been 'De-Monetized'

#77
post #2

The media’s part in this: For whatever reason they started scouring youtube for “controversial” videos checking if they had ads (no matter how little views they had) then they would contact the advertisers for comment. Advertisers would initiate damage control and pull their ads from youtube. Youtube would explain that the numbers and views in question are insignificant and that this type of complex system can never…

One possible way out of the trap is for regulation to acknowledge and classify these massive social media and content delivery platforms like YouTube and Facebook as the new version of the public square. One of the big issues with the demonetization on YouTube is that it's a binary flag -- either "acceptable content for advertisers" or "unacceptable for advertisers." As if advertisers were a single block with a singl…

This person videos weren't even strange or fringe...

The attacker videos seemly were mostly about exercising, vegan diet, and some lighthearted videos...

AFTER demonetization, seemly some videos with criticism about Youtube and US, saying that Iran (her home country) had more free speech than US, showed up.

Re: Suspect in YouTube Shooting Angry That Her Videos Had Been 'De-Monetized'

#78
post #55

I can't help but think of of the Tunisian guy who was trying to eke out a living, faced his own Arbitrary Machine (the state in this case) and lost, getting de-monetized. Then set himself on fire, more or less starting the "Arab Spring." If you never read of the Tunisian man, from wiki: > Twenty-six-year-old Mohamed Bouazizi had been the sole income earner in his extended family of eight. He operated a vegetable or a…

Self-immolation is nowhere near in the same ballpark as taking a gun into an office and murdering a bunch of people. I really don't like the parent article's line of thinking of explaining or justifying this person's act. There are plenty of ways of protesting that don't involve hurting others. And it's mind-boggling that we have to point that out at all today.

Methods of suicide are strongly culturally determined I believe.

It wouldn't be entirely surprising if the impulse that expressed itself via self-immolation in one cultural context did so via mass shooting culminating in 'suicide-by-cop' in another one (vis, the United States.)

Re: Suspect in YouTube Shooting Angry That Her Videos Had Been 'De-Monetized'

#79
> "The night before Nasim Aghdam opened fire in a courtyard at YouTube's headquarters Tuesday afternoon, Mountain View police found the San Diego woman sleeping in her car. She had been reported missing by her family in Southern California, and her father Ismail Aghdam told police she might be going to YouTube because she 'hated' the company. Police called the family at 2 a.m. Tuesday to say she'd been found and that everything was 'under control,' her father said."

The most noteworthy part of the article to me, granted that this excerpt is taken from a different San Jose news source.

Could this have been prevented? Should the father's comments have been enough reasonable suspicion to arrest her, or at least search her for firearms and confiscate them, given her threat level to society?

Edit: The replies do offer good points, so thank you! I'm personally a supporter of the Second Amendment as well; it's just heartbreaking, especially if any of the victims die, to know just how close we were to stopping it.

Re: Suspect in YouTube Shooting Angry That Her Videos Had Been 'De-Monetized'

#80
post #2

The media’s part in this: For whatever reason they started scouring youtube for “controversial” videos checking if they had ads (no matter how little views they had) then they would contact the advertisers for comment. Advertisers would initiate damage control and pull their ads from youtube. Youtube would explain that the numbers and views in question are insignificant and that this type of complex system can never…

> For whatever reason Anyone that’s been paying attention knows the reason. If you can’t attack free speech, make that speech too expensive. All of the recent controversial issues have one side scrambling to publicly list advertisers - see the March Against Guns tweets about who has deals with NRA or advertises on Fox News. It’s a horrible tactic that’s very much mob censorship.

One of the most basic rights people have in America is the right to protest. You're attempting to rebrand protesting as mob censorship.
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