Nasim Aghdam sought to build a mass following online but seemed to shun connections in the real world, a world she saw as dark, diseased and unjust.
She chased eyeballs on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube with homemade videos that attracted hundreds of thousands of views, yielding not just an income source but an identity.
On social media she was more than an Iranian immigrant who lived with her grandmother in southern California –she was an athlete, a fitness guru, a model, a poet, a vegan advocate, an animal rights warrior and a film-maker. She was glamorous and fought inequity. She was a star.
“I think I am doing a great job,” Aghdam wrote in a Farsi post on Instagram. “I have never fallen in love and have never got married. I have no physical and psychological diseases. But I live on a planet that is full of injustice and diseases.”
When YouTube changed its rules, Aghdam’s video views and income, like those of many other small creators, slumped – an act she apparently interpreted as censorship, betrayal and demanding retribution.
On Tuesday, after a 500-mile drive from her home near San Diego, she allegedly entered the Google-owned company’s headquarters in San Bruno, outside San Francisco, and opened fire, wounding three employees, one gravely, before taking her own life.
The shocking act raised a host of questions about when she obtained and registered a 9mm Smith & Wesson handgun, about security on Silicon Valley campuses and about the police who earlier on Tuesday found her sleeping in a car in Mountain View and let her go despite warnings from her family that she might be headed to YouTube because she “hated” the company.
The other question was what apparently turned a woman who once sought to protect life into that rarity: a female shooter. An FBI study of 160 “active shooter” incidents between 2000 and 2013 found only six, or 3.8%, were perpetrated by women.
Her family have shed some light on her history. They did not return calls on Wednesday but on Tuesday her father, Ismail Aghdam, who lives in Menifee, outside Los Angeles, told the Bay Area News Group that his daughter was a vegan activist and animal lover who as a youngster would not even kill ants in the family home, instead using paper to move them to the back yard. She used to work for his electrical company.
Her brother, Shahran Aghdam, said the family had come to California from Iran in 1996. Nasim had been living recently with her grandmother in San Diego, he said. “She was always complaining that YouTube ruined her life,” he said. Police gave her age as 39 but her brother said she would have turned 38 on Wednesday.
After the shooting, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram deactivated Aghdam’s accounts, which reportedly railed at YouTube. Her website compared YouTube to Adolf Hitler and dictatorship.
“There is no free speech in real world & you will be suppressed for telling the truth that is not supported by the system. Videos of targeted users are filtered & merely relegated, so that people can hardly see their videos!”
She seemed especially aggrieved that the video-sharing site filtered her ab-workout posts even though they contained nothing “sexual”.
Aghdam’s extreme reaction suggests profound alienation, an unmooring, with no one aware of its extent or able to help.
“We assume social media is a world that is social, that when you engage in this milieu you’ll feel more connected to others. But when you crunch the numbers you find the opposite,” said Brian Primack, director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Research on Media, Technology, and Health.
He co-authored a study which found that people who spent more than two hours a day on social media were twice as likely to feel socially isolated as people who spent less than half an hour a day.
An imperfect analogy of the human need for real world connectedness, said Primack, was eating Apple Jack cereal instead of apples. “It still has the sweetness and calories but doesn’t provide the true nutrients.”
For a time Aghdam campaigned for animal rights with other people. She attended several demonstrations about nine years ago, said the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Then she changed her phone number and “dropped out of sight”.
The young woman with eclectic passions seemed to thrive on social media, a realm where she could curate a heroic persona, find an audience and make money – a fragile construction, it turned out. When it unravelled, she got a gun and sought revenge in the world beyond the screen.
