Assessing the Active Shooter Attack Against YouTube Headquarters, on April 3, 2018, and Prevention Measures

By Dr. Joshua Sinai

This article assesses the ramifications of the active shooter attack by Nassim Aghdam on April 3, 2018 at the YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California. The attack wounded three of the company’s employees, with one of them dying from his wounds. Another victim had injured her ankle while escaping from the incident. The shooter then killed herself at the scene of her attack.

The attack is categorized as a psychologically disordered active shooter incident, which to the YouTube company represented, although this is a bit of a definitional stretch, a Workplace Violence, Type 3: Employee on Employee attack. Aghdam, a YouTube vlogger (video blogger), earned a commissioned revenue from the popularity of her videos through the placement by YouTube generated algorithms of advertisements on her YouTube channels. Although it is a gray area, Aghdam basically worked as an independent contractor for YouTube, thus her vengefulness towards the social media company, while not as an employee, was more like a contractor than a customer, which would have not made the attack a workplace violence type 2: customer/patient on employee) or a workplace violence type 1: criminal.

With YouTube, an online video sharing platform, censoring her videos’ graphically extremist animal cruelty messaging by pulling them of her channels, thereby lowering her commissioned income, this represented a primary motivator for her vengeful rage against the social media company. One ...