Take Two translates the day’s headlines for Southern California, making sense of the news and cultural events that affect our lives. Produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from October 2012 – June 2021. Hosted by A Martinez.
The 39-year-old woman who opened fire on YouTube's California headquarters Tuesday had a long-running dispute with YouTube, according to law enforcement officials.
Nasim Aghdam, who used the name Nasime Sabz online, had decried YouTube's policies, saying the web site was trying to "suppress" content creators. Her father, Ismail Aghdam, told the Bay Area News Group that she "hated" the company.
Mark Bergen is a technology reporter with Bloomberg. He said Aghdam's frustrations with YouTube appear to be tied to the site's policies of not allowing ads on certain videos, a process called 'de-monetizing.'
Bergen said these de-monetization policies have changed in the last year because advertisers complained about their ads running before videos with offensive content. Some advertisers even suspended their ads on YouTube, so the company responded by becoming more restrictive about which videos could have ads.
YouTube did not have many policies moderating content when the site began, but as the site grew, it began to see a need for some restrictions, Bergen said.
YouTube is now massive... They didn't put a lot of these policies in place over the years. Now they're scrambling to come up with policies that can appease both the advertisers and the video creators, which is an incredibly difficult thing to do.
Some content creators were upset by the new ad policies because they were seeing less ad revenue, and others felt YouTube was not transparent enough about their policy changes, Bergen said, but YouTube has said only a small number of creators have seen large dips in revenue, and they're trying to improve transparency.