The YouTube shooter, a militant vegan and viral celebrity in Iran, thought she was entitled to ad money. So much so, she shot up YouTube HQ on April 3rd, injuring three before taking her own life.
In the aftermath of the shooting, there was a major push among media to discuss demonetization -- the apparent motive of the shooter. I abstained because this initial focus on Google’s ad policies came across as victim-blaming. Online conversation included the likes of “if only YouTube hadn’t stopped running ads on her videos, then she wouldn’t have shot up their office in the first place” as well as the obnoxious hashtag #CensorshipKills shared by right-wing extremists. However, after mulling for days, I realized not talking about the digital component in regards to this mass shooting is just not possible -- this crime has a very modern motive and relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of the definition of censorship that has become increasingly popular among online communities.
Demonetization, for those out of the loop, is when YouTube deems your video content not advertiser-friendly. (Contrary to most media, this practice did not start with the “Adpocalypse,” it has been an issue since the platform first began sharing ad revenue with creators.) YouTube initially makes the decision to demonetize a video automatically via a secretive algorithm that incorporates community guidelines. Creators can appeal this decision to get a real human person at YouTube to look at the content who will either uphold the robot’s decision on the video or reverse it. This system is put in place primarily to protect brands that advertise on YouTube.
No one is entitled to ad money, not even for videos that took more than 72 hours to make. There is no contract that a creator signs that says they will get paid for every view they generate. In many ways, the ad revenue earned by creators is a privilege. In the YouTube shooter’s case, her videos featuring animals being tortured in factory farms clearly violated community guidelines on gore and violence. The YouTube shooter interpreted the demonetization of her vegan videos as part of a conspiracy of meat vendors trying to silence her, and not the reality of a brand not wanting their product associated with her content. If you remove the online setting and the shooter’s mental illness, the situation that led up to the gun violence is a new kind of labor-versus-management problem. The YouTube shooter wasn’t on YouTube’s payroll as an employee, but she was still a worker… who was not being paid for her labor.
Many creators treat their channels like full-time home businesses, and themselves as their own bosses, but those that haven't figured out how to diversify their revenue streams are beholden to YouTube as an employer, and in some cases as a landlord, from the wages they earn to the online real estate where they sell their goods. YouTube never really “hires” the content creators in any traditional sense though and while their relationship with creators could be compared to content vendors renting in a grand digital mall and condo-type Superplex, even there renters rights don't apply.
To make it even more confusing, YouTube is not a government entity but that doesn't stop its users from treating the corporate platform if it is one on the regular. You see this in the community’s claims that they are being censored when they don’t get ad money or when their content is not displayed in Restricted mode (whether or not the creators are marginalized by these policies is another matter). You see this in the community's repeated requests for transparency over proprietary information (YouTube’s algorithms) and when they use language like "corrupt" to describe seemingly mundane aspects of the site like what content appears on the Trending tab. The YouTube shooter even described the company as “a dictatorship,” completely forgetting that YouTube itself is at the mercy of brands that advertise on the site.
To be fair to YouTube here, they are not a talent management company (that is the void MCN’s were supposed to fill), but a big tech company specializing in ads that solves its problems with... more big tech. Management of content workers and the fruits of their labor have been outsourced to machines.
No one would accept an algorithm changing their salary on a whim at any other job, and yet, that is the reality for creators on YouTube. The only real rights creators have on the platform are over copyright and even that is flimsy in the face of the automatic copyright bot that heavily favors media conglomerates over small independent content creators, even if the indie creator had their content stolen by said media conglomerate. This is why young people who have grown up on the Internet feel no remorse tweeting hateful things at the YouTube Twitter account managed by real people in the wake of the YouTube shooting.
I write all this not to provide justification for shooting low level employees (anyone important enough to be making policy decisions wouldn’t be located on first floors of any office building anyway, so the YouTube shooter’s act seems more like terrorism than a protest)... but to explain her motives and the people who are making her a hero.
Besides obsessively re-uploading the YouTube shooter’s content and remixing her videos, there are a plethora of memes now about her -- either to be edgy, to digest trauma through humor, to protest YouTube policies or a combo of all three. While it’s true any American mass shooter will be meme-ified into eternity by trolls and edgelords, the YouTube shooter has three things going for her: 1) it is easy to mock the mentally ill, 2) she has an enormous library of unhinged and lo-fi content you’d once find only on a cable access TV channel after 2am, and 3) she embodies the frustrated, unpaid and “censored” Internet content worker. A smattering of comments from the various Internet trash peanut galleries (KiwiFarms, 4chan, YouTube comments, etc) about the shooter include: “Better than Sam Hyde,” “New queen of /pol/,” “This is the best video on YouTube,” “A Goddess for the ages,” and most relevant: “She lived defending animals, and she died defending free speech.” Any attempts to remove content related to the YouTube shooter only make online miscreants spread her content further as a kind of middle finger to YouTube proper. A “they may have ‘censored’ her while she was alive but they cannot censor her in death” kind of mentality.
Asking YouTube to change advertising policy, to be more transparent, and to communicate better with creators because of this shooting is unfair as is saying the company brought this on themselves. The onus here lies not on the victims (of gun violence mind you!) but elsewhere. Calls to regulate the overall online gig economy, the creation of a union and safety net for freelancers, a re-evaluation of how weapons are sold, policing strategies and even providing easy access to mental health professionals are better places to start.
