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Suspect in YouTube Shooting Posted Rants About the Company Online

284 points by mbgaxyz 9y ago

alex_young 9y ago
It seems like the revenue share may have pushed her over the edge. Honest question: does the revenue share program do anything positive? It seems like it increases noise quite a bit to me.
- josephpmay 9y ago
  Revenue sharing keeps creators from switching to another platform. A significant number of people make their living off of Youtube
  - alex_young 9y ago
    I understand that people can make a significant amount of money that way, but is there really another platform to switch to that could offer the same?
Natsu 9y ago
I have to really wonder if YouTube is actually anti-vegan or if she was filtered for something else.
- rmrm 9y ago
  I watch a vegan channel that Youtube recommended to me quite often, and Im not even vegan. Based on her page, showing dogs being boiled alive, I think vegan isnt perhaps the best description for that content. A vegan channel is someone showing how to make salads.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - nailer 9y ago
    YouTube should be smarter than having a Boolean for 'monetiziable'. Eg, vegan channel showing animal cruelty should be marked as showing 'animal cruelty (newsworthy)' and advertisers should be able to say they do/don't want to advertise on the 'animal cruelty (newsworthy)' tag. A big game hunting company might not want to advertise on that tag. Nor would a children's toy manufacturer. Fine. But the RSPCA, an environmentalist politician, or The Body Shop might want to advertise and if I was a vegan I might want to give them my money. > A vegan channel is someone showing how to make salads. I can see that's the most common case, but check out for example /r/vegan - it's mostly content about vegan ethics.
    - rmrm 9y ago
      I dont disagree that makes sense, in that it theoretically makes Youtube more money as well. Based on that, it seems like they are incentivized to figure it out. Unless that long tail of "non wholesome" videos really doesnt have enough money behind it to make it worthwhile to bother with. Which Im guessing is the case.
    - Nuzzerino 9y ago
      Couldn't agree more. Google is in the business of deciding what users want to see, and also apparently deciding, for the advertisers, who they want to do business with.
  - seattle_spring 9y ago
    Seems to me that modern day veganism is more related to showing provocative videos of animal abuse than it is making salads.
    - KozmoNau7 9y ago
      Vegan activism, which is a very small, but very vocal minority.
    - rmrm 9y ago
      Could be, I have no idea. I just watch a funny guy make salads and do weird diet experiments.
    - dc_gregory 9y ago
      It isn't. Its just the noisy people tend to be the most visible. The vast majority of vegans (including myself) just want to find good food.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
  - dang 9y ago
    Please don't post unsubstantive comments, especially on divisive topics. It makes this place worse and encourages others to do the same.
- freakMagnet 9y ago
  She’s obviously a weirdo, and while many thousands of weirdos operating on her level usually turn out to be harmless, if eccentric, she seems to willfully blunder into explicit and vulgar territory, with no understanding or appreciation for the chilling effect it has, and instead, reacting with confusion when it doesn’t go her way, seemed to court the negative attention further, without differentiating between the end games that each carries. Negative attention tends to isolate, while positive attention holds opportunity for sustained returns. But she obviously was profoundly untethered from reality or consequence for too long.
  - denweb 9y ago
    use periods please
adventured 9y ago
This looks like it's going to be an increasingly big problem for the platform giants, as it pertains to their increasingly aggressive speech restrictions. As they ramp those restrictions up, I'd expect the need for security to increase accordingly. A mentally unwell person is likely to feel targeted, oppressed, threatened, harmed, etc. by being silenced. They'll feel isolated and it'll very likely feel like a personal attack by the tech company. The platforms today are so large, it surely can seem like being cut off from society in general, like a human right is being revoked. The people the platforms are looking to restrict based on expressed views or behavior, I suspect, are going to tend to have higher than normal rates of mental illness (emphasis that I think it's likely to be a higher rate, not universal).
- taneq 9y ago
  > A mentally unwell person is likely to feel targeted, oppressed, threatened, harmed, etc. by being silenced. Even a perfectly healthy 'normal' person will feel this way after being (what they see as) unfairly and arbitrarily silenced / disenfranchised.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - adventured 9y ago
    Of course. I emphasized that I believe it's likely to be a higher than normal rate of mental illness, specifically to preempt the obvious responses I'd get, people will emotionally jump to a conclusion that I'm saying everyone falls into that category. I personally know a few extreme conspiracy theory prone people, that drift into some pretty terrible areas intellectually (from lizard people to anti-semitism). In one case, the person has gotten progressively worse as the years have gone by, they seem crazy at this point. Their views are now being aggressively silenced/blocked by Facebook. I believe mental illness is a not uncommon context with a lot of people that end up like this person and end up getting silenced by the platforms.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
noemit 9y ago
She had a lot of YouTube subscribers - It’s possible it was her main source of income.
chapill 9y ago
I'm sure this submission will get flagged off the front page too because "Iranian woman bears arms against YouTube for censorship" doesn't really fit the narrative around here, but here's her page before it's wiped out too. Her YT and Insta have already been nuked. http://www.nasimesabz.com/ http://www.nasimesabz.com/
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- taneq 9y ago
  I must admit my first thought on hearing there was an attack on YouTube was that their recent monetisation changes have put a lot of people out of work, and some of those people must be feeling pretty desperate.
  - Jesus_Jones 9y ago
    This got too long, but to summarize my point there's a vast amount of content on the internet and those people feeling that someone not finding them via google is a cheat are over-reacting. The world is so big that there are lots of people no one ever hears about, who may be doing interesting stuff. Feeling that people don't find your cool stuff is a complaint you can make against google, facebook, instagram, maybe bing if anyone used it, any indexing site. For every person that youtube or whatever other ranking site give them lots of viewers, there are millions of people posting stuff that hardly anyone ever sees. It's not a conspiracy that no one really watches my son's youtube game discussion site. There are thousands of videos every day created with similar content. So all these people mad that they don't have lots of viewers, a bunch of that can be explained because there are lots of people doing the same thing. Now for the people who used to get lots of views and then things drop off after a google ranking change, sure, the change must have had some impact. So your site with videos in say Farsi about how to exercise with a particular style of workouts, probably there are 100 other people doing videos for working out in Farsi or whatever. There's basically no way google or anyone else can balance it out. They make changes that they think will serve their users. Google works for a lot of people because it's a good clearing house. But it's good for people cause they can find things they want. Google cannot show all the thousands of videos every day on say fortnight. But my son's video game discussion site hardly gets any views. but thats because he's not famous and he's not doing anything that other people are. I also think people try to make their site go higher by paying for links to their site. In a previous job, (I heard) they paid someone who was a wikipedia editor to create entries for their company and the founder, of course this is a known problem. I think I'm sounding like a google or big company apologist. I have seen a similar issue in phone apps. My friend had a bunch of android and ios programs for tracking various things that he sold for a dollar, and the ideas got copied by people doing similar things multiple times and now he's just one person is a sea of solutions. He used to get a few $100 a month from people buying his $1 software, now he gets $5. It's not a conspiracy.
mudil 9y ago
No justification for her actions, but Google does act as a serf master over the entire internet. It can single handedly decide who succeeds, who fails, and there is no recourse. There is no recourse, no appeal. Some 20 year old dude in Menlo Park decides, and your website, your life, your work, your future, is changed forever. Here's our account: https://www.medgadget.com/google https://www.medgadget.com/google
- mudil 9y ago
  Why downvoting? We have an honest website since 2004! That's more than 14 years. We do interviews, reviews, conferences reports. Medical technologies: no politics, no controvertial content. All our staff is US and European-based MDs and PhDs, hard working professional people. And starting with Panda update by Google, we can barely survive... Read our account: the story is true and is very honest.
  - mudil 9y ago
    Maybe before downvoting people need to realize that Google, instead of fostering a better internet, by working on promoting honest and hard working publishers and creators, decided that it will concentrate on goals of increasing its own profitability? Do you see new publishers popping up on the internet? Have you heard of such as thing as VC investment rounds in start ups in publishing? No? Maybe Google has something to do with it. And internet is poorer, as a result, and your experience on internet is poorer.
    - Jesus_Jones 9y ago
      well google is a money making enterprise, so is say medium, the blogging service. medium aren't doing anything to help other publishers, just themselves, right? i think google has done some stuff to help the world, the internet, but they are so big when they make changes to reduce spam say, millions or thousands of people get pushed out of the way too.
  - CaliforniaKarl 9y ago
    I didn't up or downvote, but speaking only for myself, as someone who's not working in the space your site covers, your post looked to me like an ad for your site, and that kindof rubbed me the wrong way. Some of the wording ("serf master", for example) also rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe that's just me, though.
noemit 9y ago
Google and YouTube content policy is geared to make them money, not be “free” or “equal”
- bsimpson 9y ago
  Ummm, you just posted about exactly that.
tristanj 9y ago
Looks like this is the culprit's website http://www.nasimesabz.com/index.html http://www.nasimesabz.com/index.html There are links to her (4?) youtube accounts, which have all been terminated. There's a link to her instagram, which has also been terminated, however there is a cached-copy here http://www.pictame.com/tag/yesilnasim http://www.pictame.com/tag/yesilnasim
- chapill 9y ago
  Censorship works fast friend. I've already posted this, but was censored too. You need to showdead in your prefs to see such things.
  - Density 9y ago
    We've built a private China for ourselves.
- mankash666 9y ago
  It's a pity that Google terminated those accounts - I don't know what scrutiny scares them. As for the lady, she seems to genuinely believe in veganism and fitness. Whatever weird things she did to propagate that seemed to be working (330K views?!!). Why she resorted to gun violence is much awaited.
  - verroq 9y ago
    >Why she resorted to gun violence is much awaited Because from a game theoretic POV it creates the biggest impact. The media cycle will after every shooting will surely keep her message in the spotlight for weeks to come.
  - chapill 9y ago
    Here's her last video. One youtube doesn't want you to see evidently, https://www.freedomsafespace.com/m/videos/view/YouTube-Shooter-s-Message https://www.freedomsafespace.com/m/videos/view/YouTube-Shoot... She seems really upset.
grizzles 9y ago
She's a disgruntled Youtuber. This is her website: http://nasimabc.com/ http://nasimabc.com/ From her page showing a screenshot of her Youtube ad revenue dashboard: > Analytics Last 28 days > Views 366,591 > Revenue $0.10 Highlighted in Red: Revenue $0.10? There's also another bit where she shows her historical vs. current traffic and makes a reasonable case that she's getting down ranked. Interesting times.
- leereeves 9y ago
  > Views 366,591 > Revenue $0.10 So basically all of her videos were demonetized?
  - grizzles 9y ago
    Looks like it. Considering that she would have needed to increase her views by 3 orders of magnitude to scratch out $100/month from them. She should have did affiliate marketing & patreon.
    - quickthrower2 9y ago
      > She should have did affiliate marketing & patreon. And, like, ... not shot people.
      - duncan_bayne 9y ago
        It's funny how often that's a bad solution to a problem. Not always mind you ... but mostly.
        solarkraft 9y ago
        She did get some wider attention to a problem that has been discussed inside the YouTube community before. While that's not something I'd want to die for, she may have reached her goal.
        9y ago
avree 9y ago
Why was her YouTube channel nuked after this happening? Seems weird and dystopian, even if what she did was obviously very wrong.
- rmrm 9y ago
  Probably because you dont know what she put up there, and you dont want to give an attempted murderer a giant platform, as a win.
  - avree 9y ago
    I do know what she put there, though, since on the internet is is fairly trivial to see what was on a publicly available and commonly crawled website before it was removed. And there was nothing that related to the killing, and nothing even tangentially related to the ban message. No 'final manifesto' or anything like that. If you are curious, here is a mirror of her videos: http://www.dailymotion.com/yesilnasim/videos http://www.dailymotion.com/yesilnasim/videos
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - whamlastxmas 9y ago
      Those have also all been removed
- Shank 9y ago
  The terms of service permits Google/YouTube to terminate an account for basically any reason. On a purely reactionary level, shooting at a company's employees is a pretty good reason for account termination. Edit: As mentioned in an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16751945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16751945), apparently YouTube doesn't have a blanket account termination clause in the terms of service. I stand by my rationale, but want to make it clear that I actually got this wrong.
- danso 9y ago
  It's general practice to shut down accounts of people who perpetuate infamous criminal acts, so as to at least prevent copycats.
Geee 9y ago
Her videos are still up on Dailymotion http://www.dailymotion.com/yesilnasim/videos http://www.dailymotion.com/yesilnasim/videos
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
shadowmore 9y ago
Content platforms have no place policing content. All the algorithms currently used are utterly flawed, and they will always be flawed, both technically and morally. Technically, they'll always have false positives, especially at scale. Morally, they turn the platform owners into political figures inherently, siding with or against certain thoughts and sentiments. The only solution is for platforms to be completely content agnostic and allow absolutely everything except outright graphic violence and adult content. No removing any kind of speech whatsoever, including so-called "hate speech", no policing political topics, no identifying "fake news" and so forth -- words cannot hurt anyone, objectively, and everyone has their own personal agency to decide what they want to watch and make their own decisions based on what they see, even if it's state-funded propaganda. If the police or FBI come to them with a warrant and take down notice, then sure. Otherwise, allow absolutely everything, and allow the free market of popularity to reign supreme. In fact, all sides of all political and social issues should be outraged that content platforms think they have a place deciding what we can and cannot see. And advertisers should stop allowing online outrage to dictate where they advertise by realizing two simple truths: a) if I'm watching a video with your advertisement on it, it's because I made the conscious choice to watch that video, and even if the video is about apartheid or waterboarding or guns, it's content that I want to consume, so they have no place stripping me of my personal agency, and b) the old model of advertisers being seen as endorsers for TV shows doesn't apply to on-demand online content.
- seattle_spring 9y ago
  They tried that. It's called "the_donald", and it completely overran and ruined Reddit.
- pitaa 9y ago
  > advertisers should stop allowing online outrage to dictate where they advertise I agree, but good luck convincing the Tide executives that its okay for their ad to play before a video of a KKK rally. Furthermore, how do you even create a content platform that doesn't police content and not have it immediately attract scores of users that are only there because they were banned from everywhere else, thus turning your platform into a cesspool that the more mainstream users avoid? (see voat.co)
idlewords 9y ago
Please consider not giving this person the online attention she sought as a result of her actions, and join me in flagging stories that dwell on her motives.
- Nuzzerino 9y ago
  Good luck with that. The cat's out of the bag, and this may be the shot that was heard round the world.
- chapill 9y ago
  Please consider reading the guidelines of this site. I'm sure that dang is reading these.
- yakshaving_jgt 9y ago
  Would you have said the same thing about Mark Conditt? Or is there a difference? Should we talk about some murderers and not others? Was he a terrorist? Was she?
  - idlewords 9y ago
    We know that reporting on a killer's identity and motives in detail encourages ideation in others. I think it's fine to talk about these people, but context is important. In this case, it appears to be someone who was frustrated with a lack of social media attention; we should be careful in not rewarding her heinous act in a way that encourages a future shooter.
    - Jesus_Jones 9y ago
      i think its more likely she was frustrated at losing payment, which could be completely separate from "social media attention".
    - Trundle 9y ago
      She was getting plenty of attention. She was not getting plenty of money.
vowelless 9y ago
Firstly, my sympathies with the people at Youtube HQ. I have many, many friends in the bay area and so this kind of thing hits close to home. Secondly, I struggle when thinking about if we should give airtime to a shooter's grievances, or reasons. Or even mention who they are. I tend to be on the side of: don't give them any air time. And certainly, don't acquiesce to this type of behavior because it is almost by definition "terrorism" (using violence to cause change in policies). On the other hand, I have been hearing a lot about YouTube demonitization, censorship, etc. Should this shooting be a part of the discussion about censorship? Should YouTube and the tech community let it affect the discourse around censorship? I don't know.
- danso 9y ago
  YouTube (and other social media services) usually take down the accounts of headline-making killers. You're asking if they should make an exception in this case?
  - vowelless 9y ago
    No, that is not what I am asking. In parallel, there has been a conversation going on about demonitization, censorship, etc (see the removal of the gun videos recently). My question is, should such a shooting have any impact on that conversation? I feel like we should restrain ourselves from letting violent acts like this impact those conversations, even if the violent acts were done "in the name of" fighting against censorship
    - danso 9y ago
      > My question is, should such a shooting have any impact on that conversation? Did you expect that the shooting would have a meaningful impact in the debate? Certainly, people will mention her name in the next few months, because of the infamy of her acts. But no, I don't think Google is going to openly say that an attempted mass murder of their employees was an incentive or disincentive. For likely the same reason why governments don't typically negotiate with ransomers and terrorists.
komali2 9y ago
First two comments good for a world-weary chuckle: 1. Xenophobic, hateful comment about Muslims 2. Complaint about her suicide being a waste because "she's hot" Still not sure why news websites bother with comment sections. I guess because it counts as "engagement?"
- petre 9y ago
  Interferes with their narrative, adds the overhead of moderation because trolling is usually prevalent. Can still be fun to read sometimes.
ravenstine 9y ago
It turns out that when an organization applies rules arbitrarily, they eventually piss off the wrong person.
- matthewbauer 9y ago
  Sounds like you are blaming the victim.
  - ben509 9y ago
    As a general principal, there is no logical or moral reason why a victim should be beyond blame. The goal should be to judge the situation fairly; just as much as you don't want to automatically blame the victim, neither should you automatically find the victim blameless.
    - anxrn 9y ago
      Give me one good reason why blaming a random Google employee lunching in the cafeteria is "fair". (Disclaimer: I witnessed the shooting today, so not quite unbiased)
      - ravenstine 9y ago
        Just so we're clear, I'm not blaming a "random" Google employee, as you are suggesting. I don't want to downplay this tragedy, and I wouldn't say that anyone deserved it. It's horrible that you had to witness what happened, and I'm sorry to hear it.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - ben509 9y ago
        We consider crimes against young children to be particularly bad precisely because they're genuinely blameless. Once you get past childhood, though, you're a moral agent making choices. If you work at a company, yeah, you are in a small part contributing to their actions and by continuing to work there, assenting to those actions. After all, a random Googler lunching in the cafeteria wants the prestige associated with all the good things Google does, that's got to come with some measure of blame for the bad things Google does. You can't have it both ways.
aaaaaaaaaaa12 9y ago
One of her complaints was that YouTube age-restricted her yoga videos (which were modest by Western standard, she was just wearing shorts, a shirt and no socks), while not age-restricting much more explicit Nicki Minaj and Miley Cyrus videos. Is there any explanation to why YouTube does this?
- Nuzzerino 9y ago
  That depends on your definition of explanation. There are loads of complaints and theories. Here's the official policy: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278?hl=en I'm really not a fan of the policy, and it would be a real shame if it wasn't changed. But it would also be a shame if it was changed because of a shooting. It shouldn't have come to this in the first place.
  - nailer 9y ago
    The presence of the 'Advertiser-friendly content guidelines' document isn't an answer to the question, which is why the guidelines aren't consistently applied.
  - verylittlemeat 9y ago
    She had a pretty good point. Any given popular music video is loaded with borderline porn. Why were her fully clothed yoga videos (that weren't even questionably sexual) not allowed but the former were?
    - silveroriole 9y ago
      Part of this is obvious: youtube restriction policies are largely based on what is advertiser-friendly, and popular music videos are advertiser-friendly by definition. I don’t know what caused her videos to be demonetised, but she’s not wrong - it does seem pretty much arbitrary with no proper channel for disputing it.
      - prawn 9y ago
throwaway84742 9y ago
If not a gun, it would be a bomb. They need to pay attention to people’s feelings about the whole demonetization thing (and to campus security). People tend to get irrationally pissed off about these online slights. All it takes is a pressure cooker, some black powder and ball bearings. One trip to Walmart, in other words.
onetimemanytime 9y ago
As I see it: She posted on her site that she made 10 cents for 366,000 views these days. She must have been making quite a bit and then probably the algo determined that she is not making advertiser friendly videos so the spigot got closed. Must have appealed, we all know how those work.
jd20 9y ago
So if this person was not an employee, it's amazing to me how she got into the building? Usually these large tech campuses are pretty locked down, with at least one badged entrance, and security or front desk staff watching who comes and goes. That said, I've never visited the YouTube campus, so maybe it bucks the norm.
- bitumen 9y ago
  The shooting appeared to occur or at least begin in an outdoor cafe area.
- rdl 9y ago
  It was outdoors. Also, I have only been to a couple SV tech companies where they had solid enough doors/etc. at entrance to actually stop someone going in shooting from getting inside; the security is really just there for keeping homeless out, as well as to enforce corp secrecy/etc.
  - jd20 9y ago
    I see, early reports seemed to indicate the shooter was at a party, possibly inside. Really sad when employees in the bay area, which is generally very safe, have to fear for their lives because of something their employer may have done to piss someone off.
    - rdl 9y ago
      This incident was enough of an outlier that probably the correct thing to do is nothing, although that's really hard for people to accept. I'd just recommend improved first aid/trauma response (put AEDs around, train people to CLS standard).
      - sitkack 9y ago
        As sad as this is, dying in a car crash is more likely.
    - sneak 9y ago
aaomidi 9y ago
So looking at her videos on Telegram (https://t.me/nasimesabz1 https://t.me/nasimesabz1), she was anti gun. She was a very weird individual with clear mental health issues. I don't even know what to make of most of her content on that channel.
- Jesus_Jones 9y ago
  Can you expand on that? Did she make irrational comments, accuse people of impossible acts, was she threatening? I looked at the 1.5 minute video someone copied out and she was upset but not frothing at the mouth.
  - pavs 9y ago
    You don't have to be "frothing at the mouth" to be mentally unstable. I saw her videos on Dailymotion and I had the impression that something is not right with her, can't really pinpoint or explain what it is. but definitely very awkward in front of the camera. Just my personal take on it.
    - verylittlemeat 9y ago
      You mean like Poppy who has millions of views on youtube? If you saw her before she was known you'd probably think she was just as likely to shoot up youtube HQ. The truth it's not as easy as it seems to separate the "merely deviant" and the violently deviant. That's why censors often choose blanket censorship of any deviance.
      - rabidrat 9y ago
        Poppy is an act though. This woman does not appear to be acting very much.
        verylittlemeat 9y ago
        Arguably the only reason Poppy got popular was because people weren't sure if she was an act. For a long time she was just "OMG who is this freaky youtube girl!!!" Obviously in hindsight we know she was an act and correspondingly interest in her has declined. Blurring the line between act and reality is one of the foundations of entertainment. It's the reason people admire good method actors so much. It's the reason people like Andy Kaufman are considered artistic gods.
flyGuyOnTheSly 9y ago
I heard on the radio just earlier that it was declared a "domestic dispute" by local police.
- jmharvey 9y ago
  I also saw those reports. I found that WNYC's "Breaking News Consumer Handbook"[1] was a useful tool for sorting through the various reports. Many of the reports citing a "domestic dispute" either cited other news outlets (in some cases, without even citing any particular outlet) or attributed its facts to vague "reports." Of the sources I was following, KRON seemed to have the lowest standards (at times even publishing contradictory statements as fact in consecutive paragraphs of their story), while NYT had the highest (but, correspondingly, stuck with the "the shooter has not been identified" line for hours longer than most other outlets). I find looking at the Wikipedia history page [2] for incidents like this educational for understanding how our knowledge of events changed over time. In this case, the Wikipedia article attributed the domestic dispute claim to two law enforcement officials who spoke to CBS News. The cited CBS News article no longer supports the facts in the Wikipedia article, but presumably did at one time. [1] https://www.wnyc.org/story/breaking-news-consumers-handbook-pdf/ https://www.wnyc.org/story/breaking-news-consumers-handbook-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=YouTube_headquarters_shooting&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=YouTube_headquart...
KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
I have a theory about workplace shootings. American companies have a very pronounced dog-eat-dog culture. So much so that whole books have been written about the workplace asshole [1]. I'm wondering if some of the shootings can be explained as the workplace asshole going one step further and bringing his guns to work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule
- ravenstine 9y ago
  How does that have anything to do with the shooting at YouTube? It comes off like you didn't even read beyond the headline. (yes, it's happened at a workplace, but this wasn't some disgruntled employee in the sense that you're making it out to be)
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
ironjunkie 9y ago
What a terrible disaster this afternoon. It should never finish like this. The only thing I hope out of this is that it will maybe relaunch the debates about the megaplatforms and censorship. (Facebook, youtube, Google,...). The bigger they become, the more they will start censoring everything. More people need to launch the movement to host their videos independentlty. Peertube is a good start for example https://joinpeertube.org/en/home/ https://joinpeertube.org/en/home/
- skookumchuck 9y ago
  People think that suppressing "hate" and "offensive" speech will only suppress speech other than theirs.
  - spacehome 9y ago
    The people who say that don't have much in the way of independent thought in the first place, so they're probably right in thinking it will never affect them.
- fixermark 9y ago
  Does Peertube have a monetization strategy for ads? If not, it doesn't really serve the use case that users who are upset about their ad revenue dropping are actually upset about.
bitL 9y ago
This is like straight out of Mr. Robot. We are living it now.
golemiprague 9y ago
That's why the founding fathers of the US were so smart, they just realised that letting people vent is the best and safest way to prevent crazies from actually acting on their craziness. I think all the silicon valley giants should just adopt the first amendment as their policy, rather than imposing all kind of stupid rules dictated by "advocates" to keep us "safe". It is also legal, at least in the US.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
John_KZ 9y ago
I'm sorry that she shot the wrong people, but despite absolutely not condoning resorting to violence, I can't say I'd feel bad had she shot the person that took away her livelihood.
- Gigablah 9y ago
  This passes for discourse on HN nowadays? Maybe it’s time to ditch this place as well.
  - apexalpha 9y ago
    No one should or does approve this kind of violence. Or any violence really. But it does show the impact that YouTubes rules can have on someone's livelihood. For us such a change in the algorithm is something we read about and forget. For someone else they might lose their income. For this one person resorting to violence, there are probably thousands that were financially destroyed by Youtubes rigorous change in algorithm and demonetization.
    - Gigablah 9y ago
      I wonder what prompted these changes in the first place.
      - apexalpha 9y ago
        A few months or a year ago Youtube was accused of 'sponsoring' alt-right vloggers who played a role in domestic US politics. These people uploaded videos to Youtube and got paid based on the views. Just like everyone really. But mainstream media kept blaming Youtube for enabling these videos. Even though they practically enable everyone as a neutral platform. So advertisers started to pull out of Youtube in general over this and Youtube went all out and reformed the entire global website to a 'better safe than sorry' policy. Removing anything even resembling 'undesirable content'. This caused a lot of what Americans would call 'collateral damage'.
danaliv 9y ago
So, nothing to do with a “boyfriend.” She didn’t even know the people she shot. Where on earth did that bad information come from yesterday?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  Sexist assumptions, I'm sure. Male shooter? Bullied 4chan gamer nerd. Female shooter? Relationship problems. Middle-eastern looking male shooter? Terrorist.
  - akerro 9y ago
    She's vegan, it's possible that her brain shrunk, less brain power = making worse decisions. Veganism should be illegal or children and society should be protected from vegans, similar way as violent games are. /s https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10479226 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10479226
  - RosanaAnaDana 9y ago
    And the fact that there are so few examples of women who commit multiple homicide where they don't target domestic partners, friends, families, coworkers, etc. Genuinely, the only known instance I've read of in the US was the San Bernadino shooter, and she was pretty clearly religiously motivated.
    - stevenwoo 9y ago
      There was the "I don't like Mondays" shooter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Elementary_School_shooting_(San_Diego) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Elementary_School_sh...
spacehome 9y ago
She's complaining about being censored. She would have been helped immensely by somebody showing her how to host her own videos on her own website.
- shi 9y ago
  No one visits personal websites to watch self-hosted videos nowadays. YouTube is not only about video hosting, but also about the large user base.
  - devmunchies 9y ago
    YouTube is so popular that it’s indirectly censoring private content by getting all the traffic.
    - ensignro2340 9y ago
      >YouTube is so popular that it’s indirectly censoring private content by getting all the traffic. forgot your /s
  - ensignro2340 9y ago
    Yes we understand that - but these were her options: continue hosting on YouTube, host on another site/hosting service (a lot of new anti-YouTubes are popping up), or self-host. She had a choice in this. YouTube being the most popular of them all doesn't mean she has to host her videos there.
  - spacehome 9y ago
    That changes one person at a time. Until then, you have to put up with Alphabet's version of morality.
pmarreck 9y ago
At what point did she wrongfully decide YouTube owed her anything?
- sigotirandolas 9y ago
  If she were to be working for an employer in an EU country, it would be illegal to just fire him person from a job without compensation. The situation is different (AFAIK she lives in the US which has far fewer job protection policies, and earning a living through YouTube doesn’t count as an employer-employee relation), but there are analogies. Few countries and jobs have so little job security as being a YouTuber.
  - pmarreck 9y ago
    > Few countries and jobs have so little job security as being a YouTuber. And unless this information is somehow hidden from anyone who consensually enters into a relationship with YouTube, this is not really a good point
    - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
      The rules of the algo which flag, hide, and demonetize videos are hidden.
      - pmarreck 9y ago
        Would it be valuable if these rules were open-source?
- written 9y ago
  Tech companies realize they owe a lot to their users. They owe them their entire existence, I'd say. It's quite obvious from their behavior and the fact they try to attract and hoard user attention. Users are valuable in general. It's not like it's one way transfer of value from companies to users. So why your rhetorical question?
_pmf_ 9y ago
Domestic dispute, huh?
fouc 9y ago
A lot of people in this thread are attempting to describe Nasim as a 'weird' or 'unstable' individual. I wonder if there's some narrative building here going on here? Many want to explain it away with a cliche. It's a shame what happened. Too bad our world isn't more like K-Pax.
- danso 9y ago
  I think she's being labeled as "unstable" mianily because of her attempt at mass murder.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
naasking 9y ago
So much for pervasive surveillance revealing domestic terrorists and other such threats.
- nerdponx 9y ago
  It also seems to be standard corporate training procedure to tell employees that they should report any behavior like this that might suggest that a coworker is "at risk" for doing something like this.
  - naasking 9y ago
    Right, because everyone is automatically a knowledgeable psychologist. It's getting uncomfortably close to "report your neighbour" type tactics.
    - CaptSpify 9y ago
      If you ask amateurs to do police work, you are going to get amateur-quality results.
mikeash 9y ago
The amount of victim blaming in these comments is astounding. Three people are in the hospital because of an armed maniac, and a bunch of the comments are about how YouTube brought this on themselves with their policies about videos. I’m not religious, but y’all need Jesus.
- vinculuss 9y ago
  The people who were shot are the victims, no one blames them or suggests they did wrong. YouTube is not a victim. Discussing questionable corporate policies of a company is not victim blaming.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    I completely disagree. YouTube is a victim too. Using an incident like this to criticize a policy you don’t like is completely beyond the pale. The fact that they apparently drove a crazy person to attempted homicide has no bearing whatsoever on whether those policies are good or bad.
    - vinculuss 9y ago
      I don't agree that corporations are people. If you believe that a corporation is a person, then I see your argument, despite not agreeing with it.
      - mikeash 9y ago
        Why do they need to be “people” to be a victim? Even if you want to insist that YouTube can not possibly be a victim, it’s still horrible to jump on a multiple attempted homicide to criticize policies about videos posted on a web site.
        orbenn 9y ago
        If you get in a car accident, no one counts your car as a victim. This is the same thing.
EleneShubladze 9y ago
How does the discrimination and filtering on youtube justify the murder? I just don't get it.
- celticninja 9y ago
  Same way school shooters justify it to themselves.
  - EleneShubladze 9y ago
    You can't justify murder. Edit: I didn't mean you personally.
    - Wingwing 9y ago
      Do you pay taxes?
ssaew333 9y ago
If you search her name on twitter, around 40% of what you see is right wing conspiracy theorists who assert, without evidence, that she was a member of ISIS. I also noticed a smaller percentage of people asserting, again without evidence, that she was an NRA member. And neither appear to be true. How do these get spread on Twitter? Are partisans mindlessly voting them up? Are bots behind this? Man, do I feel stupid for thinking the internet would be a force for good. That it would promote democracy, free speech, and critical thinking. I look at Facebook and Twitter, and the bad greatly outweighs the good. I chose a career in web dev, thinking I would be doing something beneficial, but everything we've done amounts to nothing.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
  I just searched her name on Twitter, and I didn't see a single reference in the first 50 posts to ISIS, or the NRA. So 0% for me. Maybe it's just your feed? I searched by her real name AND her instagram name. I did see a lot of weird things praising her, saying RIP, which I totally don't understand. Twitter is such a weird gross place. And some rather excellent yoga almost pornography, that might be her. It seems like the most common right wing talking point I can see is saying that this was because she was 'a radical vegan'.
  - ssaew333 9y ago
    My search was on search.twitter.com I don't have a twitter account The results have been changing. The newer you go, the more you see "radical vegan" and the less you see "jihad." That's... .encouraging.
- classicsnoot 9y ago
  I know this may seem like a silly response, but i mean it in all earnestness: Democracy may not be a basically "good thing." I know this flies in the face of a ton of social programming, but at some point we have to take the evidence as it comes to us, and if it is consistently pointing to something we did not expect or like, we can only re-jigger the pretext so many times before we have to confront the fact that maybe our assumptions were wrong. Maybe the internet is the perfect vehicle for democracy, and mob rule isn't such a great thing.
pcunite 9y ago
Is it just me or does her video facial animations appear to be virtual?
AmIFirstToThink 9y ago
I reject any and all violence. The law of the land must take its course. This woman who talked about free speech and then committed this crime against YouTube has seriously set back the arguments people were making for Free Speech on Social Media. I have given this a lot of thought in past couple of years. Current situation: A) A video could get demonetized because of following reasons: 1. An advertiser complained about it. 2. A user complained about it. 3. The system/AI flagged it inappropriate. 4. A human auditor found it inappropriate. B) Media companies (print/television/online news & press) have targeted ad-tec companies like YouTube, Facebook and others. These companies have a new way to wage war against YouTube/Facebook: drum up "ads shown on objectionable content". C) Groups with agenda trying to silence opposing viewpoints have a way to do so by reporting content as inappropriate. D) Truly illegal, criminal content E) Lack of powerful parental controls on content and on ads Problem with current situation: 1. An advertiser finding a video objectionable for their ad doesn't mean every advertiser will find the content objectionable. E.g. an insurance company may not want to advertise on a video that glorifies extreme jumping over walls, building, but a helmet company or an action cam company would find it attractive market to advertise. When youtube demonetizes a video, it's demonetized period. 2. It is ridiculously easy to stop speech on social media by abusing the inappropriate content flag. Groups with agenda that have decent enough membership can run a very effective silencing campaign on social media by abusing the report-content button. Someone doesn't like some legal content, doesn't mean that they are allowed to take out that content from anyone else viewing it. 3. YouTube or Facebook doesn't have or offer a way fight the "ads shown on objectionable content" attacks. This is especially confusing given these are the tech giants we are talking about with the might of all the technology and AI powers they wield. 4. No human recourse for the content creator to plead their case. 5. Demonetizing political commentary is astonishing, given how much advertising CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and political print media gets. 6. Would it be OK if Conoco gas station stopped hybrid cars from refueling? Would it be OK if Conoco said why doesn't the hybrid car owner start her own oil well and oil refinery? Why is is acceptable for Google to delete accounts with thousands of subscribers? What if you had a Conoco points cards with hundreds of dollars on it? Isn't that equivalent to your channels membership that YouTube yanks away from you? Solution: 1. Allow advertisers to select channels to advertise on. Advertisers opt-in to select channels. 2. Allow advertisers to select channels to specifically not advertise on. Advertisers opt-out of select channels. 3. Protect creators from harassment by targeted campaigns ran by people trying to de-platform or silence them. Embrace bubbles, let people opt out of certain tags e.g. if a user says I don't like meat preparation videos, then don't show it to them. But don't make it easy for people who don't like meat products to deplatform those who do. Fully embrace bubbles, let people know that they are in the bubbles of their chioce, enforce those bubbles and when people are ready to peek outside into another bubble that they get curious about, let them. 4. Apple can put people in front of their customers to serve them. Facebook/Google make enough money to have a customer facing team for their content creators. They have invested into hiring auditors but there is no recourse for creators. Channel being banned after having thousands of subscribers is akin to paypal locking your account with thousands of dollars in it. 5. Removing content should depend on legality (law of the land) of the content alone. Removal of account must be because of a lawful request from authorities. 6. "Demonetization" can't be blanket. Each advertiser is unique. One advertisers not liking content doesn't make it inappropriate for all advertisers. Protect creators from activist advertisers. 7. These are tech giants that we are talking about with the might of engineering and AI with them. Letting advertisers opt-in/opt-out of channels should be possible for them. The fact that they haven't done so insinuates that they like the power they wield by removing content they themselves don't like for whatever (monetary/ideological) reasons. They need to prove that they are can be trusted with this power. Conoco shouldn't be allowed to reject gas to a lawyer who is on her way to a courthouse for an EPA trial, Google shouldn't be allowed to remove accounts that it doesn't like, especially without recourse. A regulatory framework may be needed, as Zukerberg conceded recently. 8. Allow parents to whitelist channels for kids. Show videos to kids only after 1000+ views from parents who use parental controls. Allow parents to restrict the videos kids can see where parents set the video playlist and kids can pick only from that playlist. Parents can subscribe to a trusted playlist for kids e.g. from NPR or NASA or their local school, activity group or church. Absence of these tools shows YouTube willing to run videos on autoplay to maximize ads without much regards for age-appropriate parent-controlled safe video experience for kids. A parent should be able to say I don't want to see ads for Disney Cruise as they can't afford it. 9. Subscriber portability just like phone number portability from carrier to carrier. A content creator should be able to take his subscribers with her to a different service. The social network should show forwarding address to the subscribers when content creator leaves a platform for another. Bring real competition for social platforms. Disclaimer: I pay for YouTube Red, I like the ad-free experience and am glad that the option exists where I can buy that experience. I don't make, never have, any money based on the social media ad platforms. I am a consumer of content, not a creator. As a paying consumer of content, I do want complete freedom in my ability to see any legal content that others have created without an arbitrary filter of policy/guideline/appropriateness that has no basis in law of the land. I should have the ability to apply the filters if I choose to do so, just like marketplace of ideas there should be a marketplace for filters (whitelist/blacklist).
spitfire 9y ago
Serious question here. What are the liability laws like in the US for producers of propaganda? Can you hold say inforwars or brietbart (used as proxies here) liable if they insight or inflame this sort of person to go on a rampage? You could easily prove in a court of law that what they peddle is not factual so I don't see how they can't have some liability. Freedom of speech is freedom to speak, not freedom from consequences. Possible precedent here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/us/suicide-texting-trial-michelle-carter-conrad-roy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/us/suicide-texting-trial-...

284 points by mbgaxyz 9y ago

It seems like the revenue share may have pushed her over the edge. Honest question: does the revenue share program do anything positive? It seems like it increases noise quite a bit to me.

josephpmay 9y ago
Revenue sharing keeps creators from switching to another platform. A significant number of people make their living off of Youtube
- alex_young 9y ago
  I understand that people can make a significant amount of money that way, but is there really another platform to switch to that could offer the same?

Natsu 9y ago

I have to really wonder if YouTube is actually anti-vegan or if she was filtered for something else.

rmrm 9y ago
I watch a vegan channel that Youtube recommended to me quite often, and Im not even vegan. Based on her page, showing dogs being boiled alive, I think vegan isnt perhaps the best description for that content. A vegan channel is someone showing how to make salads.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- nailer 9y ago
  YouTube should be smarter than having a Boolean for 'monetiziable'. Eg, vegan channel showing animal cruelty should be marked as showing 'animal cruelty (newsworthy)' and advertisers should be able to say they do/don't want to advertise on the 'animal cruelty (newsworthy)' tag. A big game hunting company might not want to advertise on that tag. Nor would a children's toy manufacturer. Fine. But the RSPCA, an environmentalist politician, or The Body Shop might want to advertise and if I was a vegan I might want to give them my money. > A vegan channel is someone showing how to make salads. I can see that's the most common case, but check out for example /r/vegan - it's mostly content about vegan ethics.
  - rmrm 9y ago
    I dont disagree that makes sense, in that it theoretically makes Youtube more money as well. Based on that, it seems like they are incentivized to figure it out. Unless that long tail of "non wholesome" videos really doesnt have enough money behind it to make it worthwhile to bother with. Which Im guessing is the case.
  - Nuzzerino 9y ago
    Couldn't agree more. Google is in the business of deciding what users want to see, and also apparently deciding, for the advertisers, who they want to do business with.
- seattle_spring 9y ago
  Seems to me that modern day veganism is more related to showing provocative videos of animal abuse than it is making salads.
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    Vegan activism, which is a very small, but very vocal minority.
  - rmrm 9y ago
    Could be, I have no idea. I just watch a funny guy make salads and do weird diet experiments.
  - dc_gregory 9y ago
    It isn't. Its just the noisy people tend to be the most visible. The vast majority of vegans (including myself) just want to find good food.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
- dang 9y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive comments, especially on divisive topics. It makes this place worse and encourages others to do the same.
freakMagnet 9y ago
She’s obviously a weirdo, and while many thousands of weirdos operating on her level usually turn out to be harmless, if eccentric, she seems to willfully blunder into explicit and vulgar territory, with no understanding or appreciation for the chilling effect it has, and instead, reacting with confusion when it doesn’t go her way, seemed to court the negative attention further, without differentiating between the end games that each carries. Negative attention tends to isolate, while positive attention holds opportunity for sustained returns. But she obviously was profoundly untethered from reality or consequence for too long.
- denweb 9y ago
  use periods please

adventured 9y ago

This looks like it's going to be an increasingly big problem for the platform giants, as it pertains to their increasingly aggressive speech restrictions. As they ramp those restrictions up, I'd expect the need for security to increase accordingly. A mentally unwell person is likely to feel targeted, oppressed, threatened, harmed, etc. by being silenced. They'll feel isolated and it'll very likely feel like a personal attack by the tech company. The platforms today are so large, it surely can seem like being cut off from society in general, like a human right is being revoked. The people the platforms are looking to restrict based on expressed views or behavior, I suspect, are going to tend to have higher than normal rates of mental illness (emphasis that I think it's likely to be a higher rate, not universal).

taneq 9y ago
> A mentally unwell person is likely to feel targeted, oppressed, threatened, harmed, etc. by being silenced. Even a perfectly healthy 'normal' person will feel this way after being (what they see as) unfairly and arbitrarily silenced / disenfranchised.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- adventured 9y ago
  Of course. I emphasized that I believe it's likely to be a higher than normal rate of mental illness, specifically to preempt the obvious responses I'd get, people will emotionally jump to a conclusion that I'm saying everyone falls into that category. I personally know a few extreme conspiracy theory prone people, that drift into some pretty terrible areas intellectually (from lizard people to anti-semitism). In one case, the person has gotten progressively worse as the years have gone by, they seem crazy at this point. Their views are now being aggressively silenced/blocked by Facebook. I believe mental illness is a not uncommon context with a lot of people that end up like this person and end up getting silenced by the platforms.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

noemit 9y ago

She had a lot of YouTube subscribers - It’s possible it was her main source of income.

chapill 9y ago

I'm sure this submission will get flagged off the front page too because "Iranian woman bears arms against YouTube for censorship" doesn't really fit the narrative around here, but here's her page before it's wiped out too. Her YT and Insta have already been nuked. http://www.nasimesabz.com/ http://www.nasimesabz.com/

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
taneq 9y ago
I must admit my first thought on hearing there was an attack on YouTube was that their recent monetisation changes have put a lot of people out of work, and some of those people must be feeling pretty desperate.
- Jesus_Jones 9y ago
  This got too long, but to summarize my point there's a vast amount of content on the internet and those people feeling that someone not finding them via google is a cheat are over-reacting. The world is so big that there are lots of people no one ever hears about, who may be doing interesting stuff. Feeling that people don't find your cool stuff is a complaint you can make against google, facebook, instagram, maybe bing if anyone used it, any indexing site. For every person that youtube or whatever other ranking site give them lots of viewers, there are millions of people posting stuff that hardly anyone ever sees. It's not a conspiracy that no one really watches my son's youtube game discussion site. There are thousands of videos every day created with similar content. So all these people mad that they don't have lots of viewers, a bunch of that can be explained because there are lots of people doing the same thing. Now for the people who used to get lots of views and then things drop off after a google ranking change, sure, the change must have had some impact. So your site with videos in say Farsi about how to exercise with a particular style of workouts, probably there are 100 other people doing videos for working out in Farsi or whatever. There's basically no way google or anyone else can balance it out. They make changes that they think will serve their users. Google works for a lot of people because it's a good clearing house. But it's good for people cause they can find things they want. Google cannot show all the thousands of videos every day on say fortnight. But my son's video game discussion site hardly gets any views. but thats because he's not famous and he's not doing anything that other people are. I also think people try to make their site go higher by paying for links to their site. In a previous job, (I heard) they paid someone who was a wikipedia editor to create entries for their company and the founder, of course this is a known problem. I think I'm sounding like a google or big company apologist. I have seen a similar issue in phone apps. My friend had a bunch of android and ios programs for tracking various things that he sold for a dollar, and the ideas got copied by people doing similar things multiple times and now he's just one person is a sea of solutions. He used to get a few $100 a month from people buying his $1 software, now he gets $5. It's not a conspiracy.

mudil 9y ago

No justification for her actions, but Google does act as a serf master over the entire internet. It can single handedly decide who succeeds, who fails, and there is no recourse. There is no recourse, no appeal. Some 20 year old dude in Menlo Park decides, and your website, your life, your work, your future, is changed forever. Here's our account: https://www.medgadget.com/google https://www.medgadget.com/google

mudil 9y ago
Why downvoting? We have an honest website since 2004! That's more than 14 years. We do interviews, reviews, conferences reports. Medical technologies: no politics, no controvertial content. All our staff is US and European-based MDs and PhDs, hard working professional people. And starting with Panda update by Google, we can barely survive... Read our account: the story is true and is very honest.
- mudil 9y ago
  Maybe before downvoting people need to realize that Google, instead of fostering a better internet, by working on promoting honest and hard working publishers and creators, decided that it will concentrate on goals of increasing its own profitability? Do you see new publishers popping up on the internet? Have you heard of such as thing as VC investment rounds in start ups in publishing? No? Maybe Google has something to do with it. And internet is poorer, as a result, and your experience on internet is poorer.
  - Jesus_Jones 9y ago
    well google is a money making enterprise, so is say medium, the blogging service. medium aren't doing anything to help other publishers, just themselves, right? i think google has done some stuff to help the world, the internet, but they are so big when they make changes to reduce spam say, millions or thousands of people get pushed out of the way too.
- CaliforniaKarl 9y ago
  I didn't up or downvote, but speaking only for myself, as someone who's not working in the space your site covers, your post looked to me like an ad for your site, and that kindof rubbed me the wrong way. Some of the wording ("serf master", for example) also rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe that's just me, though.

noemit 9y ago

Google and YouTube content policy is geared to make them money, not be “free” or “equal”

bsimpson 9y ago
Ummm, you just posted about exactly that.

tristanj 9y ago

Looks like this is the culprit's website http://www.nasimesabz.com/index.html http://www.nasimesabz.com/index.html There are links to her (4?) youtube accounts, which have all been terminated. There's a link to her instagram, which has also been terminated, however there is a cached-copy here http://www.pictame.com/tag/yesilnasim http://www.pictame.com/tag/yesilnasim

chapill 9y ago
Censorship works fast friend. I've already posted this, but was censored too. You need to showdead in your prefs to see such things.
- Density 9y ago
  We've built a private China for ourselves.
mankash666 9y ago
It's a pity that Google terminated those accounts - I don't know what scrutiny scares them. As for the lady, she seems to genuinely believe in veganism and fitness. Whatever weird things she did to propagate that seemed to be working (330K views?!!). Why she resorted to gun violence is much awaited.
- verroq 9y ago
  >Why she resorted to gun violence is much awaited Because from a game theoretic POV it creates the biggest impact. The media cycle will after every shooting will surely keep her message in the spotlight for weeks to come.
- chapill 9y ago
  Here's her last video. One youtube doesn't want you to see evidently, https://www.freedomsafespace.com/m/videos/view/YouTube-Shooter-s-Message https://www.freedomsafespace.com/m/videos/view/YouTube-Shoot... She seems really upset.

grizzles 9y ago

She's a disgruntled Youtuber. This is her website: http://nasimabc.com/ http://nasimabc.com/ From her page showing a screenshot of her Youtube ad revenue dashboard: > Analytics Last 28 days > Views 366,591 > Revenue $0.10 Highlighted in Red: Revenue $0.10? There's also another bit where she shows her historical vs. current traffic and makes a reasonable case that she's getting down ranked. Interesting times.

leereeves 9y ago
> Views 366,591 > Revenue $0.10 So basically all of her videos were demonetized?
- grizzles 9y ago
  Looks like it. Considering that she would have needed to increase her views by 3 orders of magnitude to scratch out $100/month from them. She should have did affiliate marketing & patreon.
  - quickthrower2 9y ago
    > She should have did affiliate marketing & patreon. And, like, ... not shot people.
    - duncan_bayne 9y ago
      It's funny how often that's a bad solution to a problem. Not always mind you ... but mostly.
      - solarkraft 9y ago
        She did get some wider attention to a problem that has been discussed inside the YouTube community before. While that's not something I'd want to die for, she may have reached her goal.
        9y ago

avree 9y ago

Why was her YouTube channel nuked after this happening? Seems weird and dystopian, even if what she did was obviously very wrong.

rmrm 9y ago
Probably because you dont know what she put up there, and you dont want to give an attempted murderer a giant platform, as a win.
- avree 9y ago
  I do know what she put there, though, since on the internet is is fairly trivial to see what was on a publicly available and commonly crawled website before it was removed. And there was nothing that related to the killing, and nothing even tangentially related to the ban message. No 'final manifesto' or anything like that. If you are curious, here is a mirror of her videos: http://www.dailymotion.com/yesilnasim/videos http://www.dailymotion.com/yesilnasim/videos
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - whamlastxmas 9y ago
    Those have also all been removed
Shank 9y ago
The terms of service permits Google/YouTube to terminate an account for basically any reason. On a purely reactionary level, shooting at a company's employees is a pretty good reason for account termination. Edit: As mentioned in an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16751945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16751945), apparently YouTube doesn't have a blanket account termination clause in the terms of service. I stand by my rationale, but want to make it clear that I actually got this wrong.
danso 9y ago
It's general practice to shut down accounts of people who perpetuate infamous criminal acts, so as to at least prevent copycats.

Geee 9y ago

Her videos are still up on Dailymotion http://www.dailymotion.com/yesilnasim/videos http://www.dailymotion.com/yesilnasim/videos

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

shadowmore 9y ago

Content platforms have no place policing content. All the algorithms currently used are utterly flawed, and they will always be flawed, both technically and morally. Technically, they'll always have false positives, especially at scale. Morally, they turn the platform owners into political figures inherently, siding with or against certain thoughts and sentiments. The only solution is for platforms to be completely content agnostic and allow absolutely everything except outright graphic violence and adult content. No removing any kind of speech whatsoever, including so-called "hate speech", no policing political topics, no identifying "fake news" and so forth -- words cannot hurt anyone, objectively, and everyone has their own personal agency to decide what they want to watch and make their own decisions based on what they see, even if it's state-funded propaganda. If the police or FBI come to them with a warrant and take down notice, then sure. Otherwise, allow absolutely everything, and allow the free market of popularity to reign supreme. In fact, all sides of all political and social issues should be outraged that content platforms think they have a place deciding what we can and cannot see. And advertisers should stop allowing online outrage to dictate where they advertise by realizing two simple truths: a) if I'm watching a video with your advertisement on it, it's because I made the conscious choice to watch that video, and even if the video is about apartheid or waterboarding or guns, it's content that I want to consume, so they have no place stripping me of my personal agency, and b) the old model of advertisers being seen as endorsers for TV shows doesn't apply to on-demand online content.

seattle_spring 9y ago
They tried that. It's called "the_donald", and it completely overran and ruined Reddit.
pitaa 9y ago
> advertisers should stop allowing online outrage to dictate where they advertise I agree, but good luck convincing the Tide executives that its okay for their ad to play before a video of a KKK rally. Furthermore, how do you even create a content platform that doesn't police content and not have it immediately attract scores of users that are only there because they were banned from everywhere else, thus turning your platform into a cesspool that the more mainstream users avoid? (see voat.co)

idlewords 9y ago

Please consider not giving this person the online attention she sought as a result of her actions, and join me in flagging stories that dwell on her motives.

Nuzzerino 9y ago
Good luck with that. The cat's out of the bag, and this may be the shot that was heard round the world.
chapill 9y ago
Please consider reading the guidelines of this site. I'm sure that dang is reading these.
yakshaving_jgt 9y ago
Would you have said the same thing about Mark Conditt? Or is there a difference? Should we talk about some murderers and not others? Was he a terrorist? Was she?
- idlewords 9y ago
  We know that reporting on a killer's identity and motives in detail encourages ideation in others. I think it's fine to talk about these people, but context is important. In this case, it appears to be someone who was frustrated with a lack of social media attention; we should be careful in not rewarding her heinous act in a way that encourages a future shooter.
  - Jesus_Jones 9y ago
    i think its more likely she was frustrated at losing payment, which could be completely separate from "social media attention".
  - Trundle 9y ago
    She was getting plenty of attention. She was not getting plenty of money.

vowelless 9y ago

Firstly, my sympathies with the people at Youtube HQ. I have many, many friends in the bay area and so this kind of thing hits close to home. Secondly, I struggle when thinking about if we should give airtime to a shooter's grievances, or reasons. Or even mention who they are. I tend to be on the side of: don't give them any air time. And certainly, don't acquiesce to this type of behavior because it is almost by definition "terrorism" (using violence to cause change in policies). On the other hand, I have been hearing a lot about YouTube demonitization, censorship, etc. Should this shooting be a part of the discussion about censorship? Should YouTube and the tech community let it affect the discourse around censorship? I don't know.

danso 9y ago
YouTube (and other social media services) usually take down the accounts of headline-making killers. You're asking if they should make an exception in this case?
- vowelless 9y ago
  No, that is not what I am asking. In parallel, there has been a conversation going on about demonitization, censorship, etc (see the removal of the gun videos recently). My question is, should such a shooting have any impact on that conversation? I feel like we should restrain ourselves from letting violent acts like this impact those conversations, even if the violent acts were done "in the name of" fighting against censorship
  - danso 9y ago
    > My question is, should such a shooting have any impact on that conversation? Did you expect that the shooting would have a meaningful impact in the debate? Certainly, people will mention her name in the next few months, because of the infamy of her acts. But no, I don't think Google is going to openly say that an attempted mass murder of their employees was an incentive or disincentive. For likely the same reason why governments don't typically negotiate with ransomers and terrorists.

komali2 9y ago

First two comments good for a world-weary chuckle: 1. Xenophobic, hateful comment about Muslims 2. Complaint about her suicide being a waste because "she's hot" Still not sure why news websites bother with comment sections. I guess because it counts as "engagement?"

petre 9y ago
Interferes with their narrative, adds the overhead of moderation because trolling is usually prevalent. Can still be fun to read sometimes.

ravenstine 9y ago

It turns out that when an organization applies rules arbitrarily, they eventually piss off the wrong person.

matthewbauer 9y ago
Sounds like you are blaming the victim.
- ben509 9y ago
  As a general principal, there is no logical or moral reason why a victim should be beyond blame. The goal should be to judge the situation fairly; just as much as you don't want to automatically blame the victim, neither should you automatically find the victim blameless.
  - anxrn 9y ago
    Give me one good reason why blaming a random Google employee lunching in the cafeteria is "fair". (Disclaimer: I witnessed the shooting today, so not quite unbiased)
    - ravenstine 9y ago
      Just so we're clear, I'm not blaming a "random" Google employee, as you are suggesting. I don't want to downplay this tragedy, and I wouldn't say that anyone deserved it. It's horrible that you had to witness what happened, and I'm sorry to hear it.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - ben509 9y ago
      We consider crimes against young children to be particularly bad precisely because they're genuinely blameless. Once you get past childhood, though, you're a moral agent making choices. If you work at a company, yeah, you are in a small part contributing to their actions and by continuing to work there, assenting to those actions. After all, a random Googler lunching in the cafeteria wants the prestige associated with all the good things Google does, that's got to come with some measure of blame for the bad things Google does. You can't have it both ways.

aaaaaaaaaaa12 9y ago

One of her complaints was that YouTube age-restricted her yoga videos (which were modest by Western standard, she was just wearing shorts, a shirt and no socks), while not age-restricting much more explicit Nicki Minaj and Miley Cyrus videos. Is there any explanation to why YouTube does this?

Nuzzerino 9y ago
That depends on your definition of explanation. There are loads of complaints and theories. Here's the official policy: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278?hl=en I'm really not a fan of the policy, and it would be a real shame if it wasn't changed. But it would also be a shame if it was changed because of a shooting. It shouldn't have come to this in the first place.
- nailer 9y ago
  The presence of the 'Advertiser-friendly content guidelines' document isn't an answer to the question, which is why the guidelines aren't consistently applied.
- verylittlemeat 9y ago
  She had a pretty good point. Any given popular music video is loaded with borderline porn. Why were her fully clothed yoga videos (that weren't even questionably sexual) not allowed but the former were?
  - silveroriole 9y ago
    Part of this is obvious: youtube restriction policies are largely based on what is advertiser-friendly, and popular music videos are advertiser-friendly by definition. I don’t know what caused her videos to be demonetised, but she’s not wrong - it does seem pretty much arbitrary with no proper channel for disputing it.
    - prawn 9y ago

throwaway84742 9y ago

If not a gun, it would be a bomb. They need to pay attention to people’s feelings about the whole demonetization thing (and to campus security). People tend to get irrationally pissed off about these online slights. All it takes is a pressure cooker, some black powder and ball bearings. One trip to Walmart, in other words.

onetimemanytime 9y ago

As I see it: She posted on her site that she made 10 cents for 366,000 views these days. She must have been making quite a bit and then probably the algo determined that she is not making advertiser friendly videos so the spigot got closed. Must have appealed, we all know how those work.

jd20 9y ago

So if this person was not an employee, it's amazing to me how she got into the building? Usually these large tech campuses are pretty locked down, with at least one badged entrance, and security or front desk staff watching who comes and goes. That said, I've never visited the YouTube campus, so maybe it bucks the norm.

bitumen 9y ago
The shooting appeared to occur or at least begin in an outdoor cafe area.
rdl 9y ago
It was outdoors. Also, I have only been to a couple SV tech companies where they had solid enough doors/etc. at entrance to actually stop someone going in shooting from getting inside; the security is really just there for keeping homeless out, as well as to enforce corp secrecy/etc.
- jd20 9y ago
  I see, early reports seemed to indicate the shooter was at a party, possibly inside. Really sad when employees in the bay area, which is generally very safe, have to fear for their lives because of something their employer may have done to piss someone off.
  - rdl 9y ago
    This incident was enough of an outlier that probably the correct thing to do is nothing, although that's really hard for people to accept. I'd just recommend improved first aid/trauma response (put AEDs around, train people to CLS standard).
    - sitkack 9y ago
      As sad as this is, dying in a car crash is more likely.
  - sneak 9y ago

aaomidi 9y ago

So looking at her videos on Telegram (https://t.me/nasimesabz1 https://t.me/nasimesabz1), she was anti gun. She was a very weird individual with clear mental health issues. I don't even know what to make of most of her content on that channel.

Jesus_Jones 9y ago
Can you expand on that? Did she make irrational comments, accuse people of impossible acts, was she threatening? I looked at the 1.5 minute video someone copied out and she was upset but not frothing at the mouth.
- pavs 9y ago
  You don't have to be "frothing at the mouth" to be mentally unstable. I saw her videos on Dailymotion and I had the impression that something is not right with her, can't really pinpoint or explain what it is. but definitely very awkward in front of the camera. Just my personal take on it.
  - verylittlemeat 9y ago
    You mean like Poppy who has millions of views on youtube? If you saw her before she was known you'd probably think she was just as likely to shoot up youtube HQ. The truth it's not as easy as it seems to separate the "merely deviant" and the violently deviant. That's why censors often choose blanket censorship of any deviance.
    - rabidrat 9y ago
      Poppy is an act though. This woman does not appear to be acting very much.
      - verylittlemeat 9y ago
        Arguably the only reason Poppy got popular was because people weren't sure if she was an act. For a long time she was just "OMG who is this freaky youtube girl!!!" Obviously in hindsight we know she was an act and correspondingly interest in her has declined. Blurring the line between act and reality is one of the foundations of entertainment. It's the reason people admire good method actors so much. It's the reason people like Andy Kaufman are considered artistic gods.

flyGuyOnTheSly 9y ago

I heard on the radio just earlier that it was declared a "domestic dispute" by local police.

jmharvey 9y ago
I also saw those reports. I found that WNYC's "Breaking News Consumer Handbook"[1] was a useful tool for sorting through the various reports. Many of the reports citing a "domestic dispute" either cited other news outlets (in some cases, without even citing any particular outlet) or attributed its facts to vague "reports." Of the sources I was following, KRON seemed to have the lowest standards (at times even publishing contradictory statements as fact in consecutive paragraphs of their story), while NYT had the highest (but, correspondingly, stuck with the "the shooter has not been identified" line for hours longer than most other outlets). I find looking at the Wikipedia history page [2] for incidents like this educational for understanding how our knowledge of events changed over time. In this case, the Wikipedia article attributed the domestic dispute claim to two law enforcement officials who spoke to CBS News. The cited CBS News article no longer supports the facts in the Wikipedia article, but presumably did at one time. [1] https://www.wnyc.org/story/breaking-news-consumers-handbook-pdf/ https://www.wnyc.org/story/breaking-news-consumers-handbook-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=YouTube_headquarters_shooting&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=YouTube_headquart...

KKKKkkkk1 9y ago

I have a theory about workplace shootings. American companies have a very pronounced dog-eat-dog culture. So much so that whole books have been written about the workplace asshole [1]. I'm wondering if some of the shootings can be explained as the workplace asshole going one step further and bringing his guns to work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule

ravenstine 9y ago
How does that have anything to do with the shooting at YouTube? It comes off like you didn't even read beyond the headline. (yes, it's happened at a workplace, but this wasn't some disgruntled employee in the sense that you're making it out to be)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

ironjunkie 9y ago

What a terrible disaster this afternoon. It should never finish like this. The only thing I hope out of this is that it will maybe relaunch the debates about the megaplatforms and censorship. (Facebook, youtube, Google,...). The bigger they become, the more they will start censoring everything. More people need to launch the movement to host their videos independentlty. Peertube is a good start for example https://joinpeertube.org/en/home/ https://joinpeertube.org/en/home/

skookumchuck 9y ago
People think that suppressing "hate" and "offensive" speech will only suppress speech other than theirs.
- spacehome 9y ago
  The people who say that don't have much in the way of independent thought in the first place, so they're probably right in thinking it will never affect them.
fixermark 9y ago
Does Peertube have a monetization strategy for ads? If not, it doesn't really serve the use case that users who are upset about their ad revenue dropping are actually upset about.

bitL 9y ago

This is like straight out of Mr. Robot. We are living it now.

golemiprague 9y ago

That's why the founding fathers of the US were so smart, they just realised that letting people vent is the best and safest way to prevent crazies from actually acting on their craziness. I think all the silicon valley giants should just adopt the first amendment as their policy, rather than imposing all kind of stupid rules dictated by "advocates" to keep us "safe". It is also legal, at least in the US.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

John_KZ 9y ago

I'm sorry that she shot the wrong people, but despite absolutely not condoning resorting to violence, I can't say I'd feel bad had she shot the person that took away her livelihood.

Gigablah 9y ago
This passes for discourse on HN nowadays? Maybe it’s time to ditch this place as well.
- apexalpha 9y ago
  No one should or does approve this kind of violence. Or any violence really. But it does show the impact that YouTubes rules can have on someone's livelihood. For us such a change in the algorithm is something we read about and forget. For someone else they might lose their income. For this one person resorting to violence, there are probably thousands that were financially destroyed by Youtubes rigorous change in algorithm and demonetization.
  - Gigablah 9y ago
    I wonder what prompted these changes in the first place.
    - apexalpha 9y ago
      A few months or a year ago Youtube was accused of 'sponsoring' alt-right vloggers who played a role in domestic US politics. These people uploaded videos to Youtube and got paid based on the views. Just like everyone really. But mainstream media kept blaming Youtube for enabling these videos. Even though they practically enable everyone as a neutral platform. So advertisers started to pull out of Youtube in general over this and Youtube went all out and reformed the entire global website to a 'better safe than sorry' policy. Removing anything even resembling 'undesirable content'. This caused a lot of what Americans would call 'collateral damage'.

danaliv 9y ago

So, nothing to do with a “boyfriend.” She didn’t even know the people she shot. Where on earth did that bad information come from yesterday?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
Sexist assumptions, I'm sure. Male shooter? Bullied 4chan gamer nerd. Female shooter? Relationship problems. Middle-eastern looking male shooter? Terrorist.
- akerro 9y ago
  She's vegan, it's possible that her brain shrunk, less brain power = making worse decisions. Veganism should be illegal or children and society should be protected from vegans, similar way as violent games are. /s https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10479226 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10479226
- RosanaAnaDana 9y ago
  And the fact that there are so few examples of women who commit multiple homicide where they don't target domestic partners, friends, families, coworkers, etc. Genuinely, the only known instance I've read of in the US was the San Bernadino shooter, and she was pretty clearly religiously motivated.
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    There was the "I don't like Mondays" shooter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Elementary_School_shooting_(San_Diego) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Elementary_School_sh...

spacehome 9y ago

She's complaining about being censored. She would have been helped immensely by somebody showing her how to host her own videos on her own website.

shi 9y ago
No one visits personal websites to watch self-hosted videos nowadays. YouTube is not only about video hosting, but also about the large user base.
- devmunchies 9y ago
  YouTube is so popular that it’s indirectly censoring private content by getting all the traffic.
  - ensignro2340 9y ago
    >YouTube is so popular that it’s indirectly censoring private content by getting all the traffic. forgot your /s
- ensignro2340 9y ago
  Yes we understand that - but these were her options: continue hosting on YouTube, host on another site/hosting service (a lot of new anti-YouTubes are popping up), or self-host. She had a choice in this. YouTube being the most popular of them all doesn't mean she has to host her videos there.
- spacehome 9y ago
  That changes one person at a time. Until then, you have to put up with Alphabet's version of morality.

pmarreck 9y ago

At what point did she wrongfully decide YouTube owed her anything?

sigotirandolas 9y ago
If she were to be working for an employer in an EU country, it would be illegal to just fire him person from a job without compensation. The situation is different (AFAIK she lives in the US which has far fewer job protection policies, and earning a living through YouTube doesn’t count as an employer-employee relation), but there are analogies. Few countries and jobs have so little job security as being a YouTuber.
- pmarreck 9y ago
  > Few countries and jobs have so little job security as being a YouTuber. And unless this information is somehow hidden from anyone who consensually enters into a relationship with YouTube, this is not really a good point
  - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
    The rules of the algo which flag, hide, and demonetize videos are hidden.
    - pmarreck 9y ago
      Would it be valuable if these rules were open-source?
written 9y ago
Tech companies realize they owe a lot to their users. They owe them their entire existence, I'd say. It's quite obvious from their behavior and the fact they try to attract and hoard user attention. Users are valuable in general. It's not like it's one way transfer of value from companies to users. So why your rhetorical question?

_pmf_ 9y ago

Domestic dispute, huh?

fouc 9y ago

A lot of people in this thread are attempting to describe Nasim as a 'weird' or 'unstable' individual. I wonder if there's some narrative building here going on here? Many want to explain it away with a cliche. It's a shame what happened. Too bad our world isn't more like K-Pax.

danso 9y ago
I think she's being labeled as "unstable" mianily because of her attempt at mass murder.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

naasking 9y ago

So much for pervasive surveillance revealing domestic terrorists and other such threats.

nerdponx 9y ago
It also seems to be standard corporate training procedure to tell employees that they should report any behavior like this that might suggest that a coworker is "at risk" for doing something like this.
- naasking 9y ago
  Right, because everyone is automatically a knowledgeable psychologist. It's getting uncomfortably close to "report your neighbour" type tactics.
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    If you ask amateurs to do police work, you are going to get amateur-quality results.

mikeash 9y ago

The amount of victim blaming in these comments is astounding. Three people are in the hospital because of an armed maniac, and a bunch of the comments are about how YouTube brought this on themselves with their policies about videos. I’m not religious, but y’all need Jesus.

vinculuss 9y ago
The people who were shot are the victims, no one blames them or suggests they did wrong. YouTube is not a victim. Discussing questionable corporate policies of a company is not victim blaming.
- mikeash 9y ago
  I completely disagree. YouTube is a victim too. Using an incident like this to criticize a policy you don’t like is completely beyond the pale. The fact that they apparently drove a crazy person to attempted homicide has no bearing whatsoever on whether those policies are good or bad.
  - vinculuss 9y ago
    I don't agree that corporations are people. If you believe that a corporation is a person, then I see your argument, despite not agreeing with it.
    - mikeash 9y ago
      Why do they need to be “people” to be a victim? Even if you want to insist that YouTube can not possibly be a victim, it’s still horrible to jump on a multiple attempted homicide to criticize policies about videos posted on a web site.
      - orbenn 9y ago
        If you get in a car accident, no one counts your car as a victim. This is the same thing.

EleneShubladze 9y ago

How does the discrimination and filtering on youtube justify the murder? I just don't get it.

celticninja 9y ago
Same way school shooters justify it to themselves.
- EleneShubladze 9y ago
  You can't justify murder. Edit: I didn't mean you personally.
  - Wingwing 9y ago
    Do you pay taxes?

ssaew333 9y ago

If you search her name on twitter, around 40% of what you see is right wing conspiracy theorists who assert, without evidence, that she was a member of ISIS. I also noticed a smaller percentage of people asserting, again without evidence, that she was an NRA member. And neither appear to be true. How do these get spread on Twitter? Are partisans mindlessly voting them up? Are bots behind this? Man, do I feel stupid for thinking the internet would be a force for good. That it would promote democracy, free speech, and critical thinking. I look at Facebook and Twitter, and the bad greatly outweighs the good. I chose a career in web dev, thinking I would be doing something beneficial, but everything we've done amounts to nothing.

ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
I just searched her name on Twitter, and I didn't see a single reference in the first 50 posts to ISIS, or the NRA. So 0% for me. Maybe it's just your feed? I searched by her real name AND her instagram name. I did see a lot of weird things praising her, saying RIP, which I totally don't understand. Twitter is such a weird gross place. And some rather excellent yoga almost pornography, that might be her. It seems like the most common right wing talking point I can see is saying that this was because she was 'a radical vegan'.
- ssaew333 9y ago
  My search was on search.twitter.com I don't have a twitter account The results have been changing. The newer you go, the more you see "radical vegan" and the less you see "jihad." That's... .encouraging.
classicsnoot 9y ago
I know this may seem like a silly response, but i mean it in all earnestness: Democracy may not be a basically "good thing." I know this flies in the face of a ton of social programming, but at some point we have to take the evidence as it comes to us, and if it is consistently pointing to something we did not expect or like, we can only re-jigger the pretext so many times before we have to confront the fact that maybe our assumptions were wrong. Maybe the internet is the perfect vehicle for democracy, and mob rule isn't such a great thing.

pcunite 9y ago

Is it just me or does her video facial animations appear to be virtual?

AmIFirstToThink 9y ago

I reject any and all violence. The law of the land must take its course. This woman who talked about free speech and then committed this crime against YouTube has seriously set back the arguments people were making for Free Speech on Social Media. I have given this a lot of thought in past couple of years. Current situation: A) A video could get demonetized because of following reasons: 1. An advertiser complained about it. 2. A user complained about it. 3. The system/AI flagged it inappropriate. 4. A human auditor found it inappropriate. B) Media companies (print/television/online news & press) have targeted ad-tec companies like YouTube, Facebook and others. These companies have a new way to wage war against YouTube/Facebook: drum up "ads shown on objectionable content". C) Groups with agenda trying to silence opposing viewpoints have a way to do so by reporting content as inappropriate. D) Truly illegal, criminal content E) Lack of powerful parental controls on content and on ads Problem with current situation: 1. An advertiser finding a video objectionable for their ad doesn't mean every advertiser will find the content objectionable. E.g. an insurance company may not want to advertise on a video that glorifies extreme jumping over walls, building, but a helmet company or an action cam company would find it attractive market to advertise. When youtube demonetizes a video, it's demonetized period. 2. It is ridiculously easy to stop speech on social media by abusing the inappropriate content flag. Groups with agenda that have decent enough membership can run a very effective silencing campaign on social media by abusing the report-content button. Someone doesn't like some legal content, doesn't mean that they are allowed to take out that content from anyone else viewing it. 3. YouTube or Facebook doesn't have or offer a way fight the "ads shown on objectionable content" attacks. This is especially confusing given these are the tech giants we are talking about with the might of all the technology and AI powers they wield. 4. No human recourse for the content creator to plead their case. 5. Demonetizing political commentary is astonishing, given how much advertising CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and political print media gets. 6. Would it be OK if Conoco gas station stopped hybrid cars from refueling? Would it be OK if Conoco said why doesn't the hybrid car owner start her own oil well and oil refinery? Why is is acceptable for Google to delete accounts with thousands of subscribers? What if you had a Conoco points cards with hundreds of dollars on it? Isn't that equivalent to your channels membership that YouTube yanks away from you? Solution: 1. Allow advertisers to select channels to advertise on. Advertisers opt-in to select channels. 2. Allow advertisers to select channels to specifically not advertise on. Advertisers opt-out of select channels. 3. Protect creators from harassment by targeted campaigns ran by people trying to de-platform or silence them. Embrace bubbles, let people opt out of certain tags e.g. if a user says I don't like meat preparation videos, then don't show it to them. But don't make it easy for people who don't like meat products to deplatform those who do. Fully embrace bubbles, let people know that they are in the bubbles of their chioce, enforce those bubbles and when people are ready to peek outside into another bubble that they get curious about, let them. 4. Apple can put people in front of their customers to serve them. Facebook/Google make enough money to have a customer facing team for their content creators. They have invested into hiring auditors but there is no recourse for creators. Channel being banned after having thousands of subscribers is akin to paypal locking your account with thousands of dollars in it. 5. Removing content should depend on legality (law of the land) of the content alone. Removal of account must be because of a lawful request from authorities. 6. "Demonetization" can't be blanket. Each advertiser is unique. One advertisers not liking content doesn't make it inappropriate for all advertisers. Protect creators from activist advertisers. 7. These are tech giants that we are talking about with the might of engineering and AI with them. Letting advertisers opt-in/opt-out of channels should be possible for them. The fact that they haven't done so insinuates that they like the power they wield by removing content they themselves don't like for whatever (monetary/ideological) reasons. They need to prove that they are can be trusted with this power. Conoco shouldn't be allowed to reject gas to a lawyer who is on her way to a courthouse for an EPA trial, Google shouldn't be allowed to remove accounts that it doesn't like, especially without recourse. A regulatory framework may be needed, as Zukerberg conceded recently. 8. Allow parents to whitelist channels for kids. Show videos to kids only after 1000+ views from parents who use parental controls. Allow parents to restrict the videos kids can see where parents set the video playlist and kids can pick only from that playlist. Parents can subscribe to a trusted playlist for kids e.g. from NPR or NASA or their local school, activity group or church. Absence of these tools shows YouTube willing to run videos on autoplay to maximize ads without much regards for age-appropriate parent-controlled safe video experience for kids. A parent should be able to say I don't want to see ads for Disney Cruise as they can't afford it. 9. Subscriber portability just like phone number portability from carrier to carrier. A content creator should be able to take his subscribers with her to a different service. The social network should show forwarding address to the subscribers when content creator leaves a platform for another. Bring real competition for social platforms. Disclaimer: I pay for YouTube Red, I like the ad-free experience and am glad that the option exists where I can buy that experience. I don't make, never have, any money based on the social media ad platforms. I am a consumer of content, not a creator. As a paying consumer of content, I do want complete freedom in my ability to see any legal content that others have created without an arbitrary filter of policy/guideline/appropriateness that has no basis in law of the land. I should have the ability to apply the filters if I choose to do so, just like marketplace of ideas there should be a marketplace for filters (whitelist/blacklist).

spitfire 9y ago

Serious question here. What are the liability laws like in the US for producers of propaganda? Can you hold say inforwars or brietbart (used as proxies here) liable if they insight or inflame this sort of person to go on a rampage? You could easily prove in a court of law that what they peddle is not factual so I don't see how they can't have some liability. Freedom of speech is freedom to speak, not freedom from consequences. Possible precedent here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/us/suicide-texting-trial-michelle-carter-conrad-roy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/us/suicide-texting-trial-...