A Bahai Walks Into YouTube HQ…

Yesterday’s YouTube shooter, Nasim Aghdam, was an adherent of the Bahai faith, which appears to be a kind of Middle Eastern spin on Unitarian Universalism. Despite the Rastafarian look of the above pic, she ain’t about that. Heavy.com has more:

According to the Mercury News, the father says he warned police that his daughter had gone missing and was angry at YouTube but they called and said they found her sleeping in her car. She had recorded a video ranting that YouTube was discriminating against her. However, she did write about religion in the context of the Baha’i.

The blog post starts, “At the turn of 2014, one of our campaigns led us to the Baha’i. Thanks to Supreme Master Ching Hai et al, we were already aware of some Baha’i texts containing guidance on diet and abstinence from animal flesh. Therefore, was very keen to meet people from the Baha’i community and learn more. Not long after, we were invited to attend a local Baha’i meeting on the 8th of January 2015 at Leeds Quaker house. It is now down to the universal house of justice to take affirmative action, to ensure that the growth of Bahai principles increases it must pay special tribute to Abdul’s prophecy, about the ‘pity’ and ‘compassion’ that he observes in his verses animals/vegetarianism.”

Nobody could have predicted the likes of Aghdam to be the first to go on the (very) offensive with regard to Big Social Media and their widely acknowledged, frustratingly opaque, and seemingly arbitrary practice of filtering certain content, a.k.a. “shadowbanning.” Like others, I’d have guessed a disgruntled white male intellectual of perhaps a libertarian bent. (Complaints of a censorious nature directed at Silicon Valley do appear to be coming from the right in recent days.) Initial reports had it that the shooter stepped on to YouTube’s meatspace property for something related to a domestic dispute. Boy were they wrong about that! While her beef may have been personal, it wasn’t exactly interpersonal. And while unheard of in the US until yesterday, Aghdam, or “Green Nasim,” was something of an internet celebrity in Iran.

This attack was notable for at least two reasons: its type and the type of perpetrator. Both are fairly novel. One blogger suggests that Aghdam may very well be the world’s first Shadowban Shooter.