The woman who law enforcement sources say opened fire on the YouTube campus on Tuesday — wounding three people before killing herself — may have been angry at the video-sharing site.
Nasim Aghdam, who police said was 39 and was a San Diego resident, claimed on her social media accounts that YouTube was discriminating against her videos, many of which focused on animal rights and veganism, mixed in with bizarre musical parodies.
"Youtube filtered my channels to keep them from getting views!" Aghdam wrote on her website.
"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!"
San Bruno, California, police said they continue to investigate a motive for the shooting.
Multiple law enforcement sources had said it appeared the motive was a domestic-related dispute, but San Bruno said Tuesday night that "At this time there is no evidence that the shooter knew the victims of this shooting or that individuals were specifically targeted."
Aghdam's family told NBC News that she was a longtime YouTube user who felt she had been cheated.
YouTube "stopped everything and now she has no income," her father, Ismail Aghdam, said in a brief phone interview. He said his daughter was at YouTube on Tuesday but said he did not know how she was involved in the incident.
Police in Mountain View, California, southeast of San Bruno, said they encountered a woman named Nasim Aghdam early Tuesday morning. She was asleep in a car at a parking lot and the license plate matched that of a missing person out of Southern California, and Aghdam confirmed her identity and her family was notified, a police spokesperson said in an email.
"According to our report, at no point in our contact with the woman did she indicate she was a threat to herself or others," the Mountain View police spokesperson said.
It appears Aghdam was a longtime animal rights activist. Nearly a decade ago, she took part in a demonstration organized by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in California to protest the killing of pigs during a military exercise.
News accounts from the time said she carried a plastic sword and wore pants spattered with fake blood. "For me, animal rights equals humans rights," she was quoted as saying.
But by last year, she had turned to protesting YouTube. Her Facebook page shows a photo of her standing on a street corner in February 2017 with the heading "YouTube Dictatorship" and the message: "Hidden policy: Promote stupidity discrimination, suppression of truth."
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In one Instagram video, Aghdam appears in a black hood and asks her audience: "When it comes to freedom of speech, do you think that Iran is better than USA or USA is better than Iran?”
According to her website, she had four YouTube channels — one in Farsi, one in Turkish, one in English and one devoted to making beaded necklaces.
Public records show she worked for her father's electrical company and once had a company of her own called Peace Thunder. Her Facebook page described her simply as an "artist."