An Iranian-born woman who blogged about veganism and warned that the planet was "full of injustice and disease" had accused YouTube of suppressing her videos before she opened fire at the company's California headquarters, wounding three and killing herself.
In a series of Persian and English-language online postings, Nasim Najafi Aghdam, 39, railed against YouTube, the video-sharing site owned by Alphabet Inc's Google. In some posts, she speaks about herself in heroic terms for surviving in a hostile world. Other pages are adorned with pictures of Aghdam scowling and wearing jewelry of her own design.
"I think I am doing a great job," she wrote in Persian on her Instagram account. "I have never fallen in love and have never got married. I have no physical and psychological diseases. But I live on a planet that is full of injustice and diseases."
In an English-language video posted to her YouTube account before the channel was deleted on Tuesday, Aghdam said, "I am being discriminated. I am being filtered on YouTube. I am not the only one." Police on Wednesday were focused on the San Diego resident's anger at YouTube as a likely motive. The people she shot with a handgun seemed to have been chosen at random from the crowd at the company's outdoor plaza in San Bruno, they said.
"Obviously she was upset with some of the practices or policies that the company had employed," San Bruno Police Chief Ed Barberini told ABC's "Good Morning America" on Wednesday. A man was in critical condition and two women were seriously wounded in the attack. The shooting came in the midst of an intense phase of a long-running debate on gun rights in the United States, following the killing of 17 students and educators at a Florida high school.