YouTube employees presumably still shaken by the shooting that occurred on their company’s campus just weeks ago, say that receiving violent threats from content creators is fairly common.
Following the scary ordeal in which 38-year-old Nasim Aghdam wounded three staffers with a firearm and then took her own life, several former employees told Business Insider in a report published Tuesday that for years certain irritated YouTube users took out their own frustrations on them.
“When you have a platform that serves everyone, there are going to be people who are emotionally unstable,” an anonymous ex-YouTube employee said, according to BI. “Whenever platforms change, you get a lot of emails, some of them are rational. Some of them are irrational.”
Some of the top executives have even been accosted in person by some of these more mentally volatile individuals.
Eric Meyerson, who used to lead YouTube’s marketing department for creators, said he was confronted in 2013 at a YouTube event in Google’s offices.
“He was in a really bad frame of mind,” Meyerson, told BI. “He said something to the effect that ‘If you keep fucking with my channel I’m going to destroy you. I’m going to hurt you,’ and he implied that he was going to take it out on employees of YouTube … although it was a threat and obviously I want to take it seriously, we were used to a lot of volatility among the creator community.”
And some of those highly menacing remarks were received with more urgency.
“I forwarded (the threats) to Google security and they took it super seriously,” said Mia Quagliarello, who worked at YouTube from 2006 to 2011 as the first community manager, about a man who became incensed after his account was removed. The suspended person created his own website that directly attacked Quagliarello and her family, including using slurs and terrorizing images. “They sent over someone, like an ex-cop type, to sit on my block, like 24-7.”
Another worker at YouTube said one video creator explicitly told him to his face that he would “destroy” him, yet another reported example of such blatant intimidation, or even foreshadowing.
Despite all of these sincere and severe-sounding threats, none of the would-be perpetrators ultimately took action until Aghdam, who also felt she was being unduly censored in some way, and wasn’t receiving all the fruits of her labor. But the attestations from multiple former YouTube employees shows that the potential for violent backlash has always been there, and will likely continue. (RELATED: Judge Tosses PragerU Lawsuit Alleging Google And YouTube Are Conducting Conservative Censorship)
Google and its subsidiary YouTube did not respond to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment in time of publication.
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