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Comment by mankash666 | Hacker News Reader

It's a pity that Google terminated those accounts - I don't know what scrutiny scares them.

As for the lady, she seems to genuinely believe in veganism and fitness. Whatever weird things she did to propagate that seemed to be working (330K views?!!).

Why she resorted to gun violence is much awaited.

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> Why she resorted to gun violence is much awaited.

My theory is this: I went through some of her past images. One of them showed a picture of a dog that was being mutilated (alive). She states that dogs in China are skinned alive because they believe that it makes the meat taste better.

Well, that is going to invoke strong feelings, especially if that's part of your core cause (to expose the mistreatment of animals to the world). When YouTube censors that, they might as well be part of the problem, from her perspective.

For her personal site:

BE AWARE! Dictatorship exists in all countries but with different tactics! They only care for personal short term profits & do anything to reach their goals even by fooling simple-minded people, hiding the truth, manipulating science & everything, putting public mental & physical health at risk, abusing non-human animals, polluting environment, destroying family values, promoting materialism & sexual degeneration in the name of freedom,..... & turning people into programmed robots! "Make the lie big, Make it simple, Keep saying it, And eventually they will believe it" Adolf Hitler... 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!

Yeah I think you’re onto something. I’m also sure that pictures of animals a lot of people in Youtube’s major markets see as pets being mutilated, generated scads of complaints. When you’re dealing with many millions of people, it is not unusual to respond to large concentrations of complaints. We should probably talk more about how thst works, and how it sometimes allows for careless or bad actors to silence people. Still, it’s understandable in a context other than attempting to be a censor, and just acting like a business. She comes across as angry and rigid in her views, but that describes quite a lot of people. Still, if someone “knows” something and is very angry, it can be hard to reach them.

> It's a pity that Google terminated those accounts - I don't know what scrutiny scares them.

Because they don't want to encourage people to gawk at the death spectacle? This includes all the times a suicidal killer leaves behind a manifesto that could serve to inspire copycat killers.

The Elliot Rodgers videos are still up on YouTube, though. On the balance, it’s probably more helpful to allow people to understand what led up to these events rather than suppressing the shooter’s words for the sake of some theoretical safety benefit.

> On the balance, it’s probably more helpful []

Although this is negated by the strong positive correlation between media coverage of a shooting and an uptick in following shootings (which I'd suggest is more than "some theoretical safety benefit".)

cf http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2016/08/media-contagi...

I've heard it's the same for suicide, with even the same way of suicide used in the subsequent suicides.

That's a good point. Apparently they were taken down temporarily before being reinstated: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/05/27/youtube-...

Also worth noting is that the shooter's family could have requested the takedown.

Google can censor someone as effectively as any government. This is, in effect, the same as the government banning a book. It's not something I'm ever comfortable with, and I'm especially uncomfortable with it when it's an unaccountable company in charge.

> Google can censor someone as effectively as any government

How so?

> I don't know what scrutiny scares them

To be fair, YouTube/Google just had an active shooter on their campus. If there's anything that justifies terminating someone's account, it would be opening fire on the company directly and injuring people.

You made me scroll through the youtube TOS to see if that was considered a violation.

As far as I can tell it's technically not... in fact, I can't even find a blanket "YouTube reserves the right to remove any content, for any reason, whatsoever" statement. They don't actually need to state that in the TOS, because they do have that right, but, still.

You made me scroll through the TOS again and triple check. Indeed, there is no clause for wholesale termination, but they do require you to follow the community guidelines. Those guidelines do say that you can't promote violence -- and while committing an act of violence isn't necessarily promotion, it could be interpreted as such.

Still interesting to see that there's no blanket termination policy, though. I stand thoroughly corrected.

Section 4(J): "YouTube reserves the right to discontinue any aspect of the Service at any time."

Section 6(F): "YouTube reserves the right to remove Content without prior notice."

https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms

That's indeed quite telling about the TOS nowadays: two people from HN double/triple checked the TOS to find a simple statement and couldn't find it. Yet, it's there.

We need a grep that finds semantic meaning instead of exact string matches. Like an latent factor model of sorts.

I saw those, but the first is couched within the copyright violation rule, so I assumed it was associated. I.e. we can remove it for copyright violation at anytime.

For the second, I assumed that "if your content was removed for a reason we justified here, we don't have to warn you beforehand."

I'm no lawyer though and I'm sure in court those clauses would be summarily smacked across my face one way or the other.

If they left it up, it would get millions of hits due to the media coverage and associated buzz. They can't let her create a precedent where "1. Film an angry rant, 2. Shoot up YouTube HQ" is seen as a guaranteed way to reach large numbers of people with your message.

Not saying it's right but using violence to spread a message has been a precedent since oh I don't know.. virtually forever?

Here's her last video. One youtube doesn't want you to see evidently,

https://www.freedomsafespace.com/m/videos/view/YouTube-Shoot...

She seems really upset.

Relevant quote: "People like me are not good for big businesses."

"people like nicki minaj, miley, many others who have sensual things so inappropriate for children to watch, don't get age restricted. But videos, my workout videos, get age restricted."

Very valid points. Has coherent thoughts, and from her videos doesn't appear to be mentally crazy.

> from her videos doesn't appear to be mentally crazy

I strongly disagree.

It’s almost as if mental illness is a complex medical diagnosis that few HN commenters are qualified to make...

We're obviously thinking about this in light of the fact that she just went on an attempted killing spree. I can see how that might prejudice our thinking.

But I personally have had quite a bit of experience interacting with mentally-ill individuals both as a volunteer and through visiting family members who are in institutional care.

I am in no position to diagnose anyone, but I'd be very surprised if it does not come out that this woman had long-standing mental issues for which she refused any intervention or treatment.

Why the downvotes? This is valuable to the news report as it is a primary source for the rant.

>Why she resorted to gun violence is much awaited

Because from a game theoretic POV it creates the biggest impact. The media cycle will after every shooting will surely keep her message in the spotlight for weeks to come.

I have never met her but my guess is that she is orthorexic with a narcissism disorder and few friends. Maybe many thousands of 'Facebook friends' which is no replacement for family and a small handful of real friends.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthorexia_nervosa

'Orthorexia' masquerades as veganism but is not the same thing.

Dude, she is very obviously schizophrenic. This is as schizophrenic as any human gets. She’s on the level of Wesley Willis of Crazy Gail.

It's not obvious to me. Could you say what you see in her?

Often times when someone commits an act of violence against powerful institutions in society they are automatically labeled insane/schizophrenic.

It helps to shield the institution from any criticism and keeps the individual's motives from being closely inspected.

In the Soviet Union, political dissidents were often labeled as schizophrenics and locked up.

That's kinda what I thought, but I figured I'd give twenty spot the opportunity to say what the signs are. I've not spent a lot of time around schizophrenics, so I wouldn't know what to look for. I have, however, spent a lot of time around Aspies and would have a gut feeling for that after watching for an hour, so it doesn't seem implausible to me that he sees something I don't.

I've never heard of othorexia until today. Funny that in a country with an obesity epidemic whose number one killer is heart disease that obsessing about eating healthy food is considered a mental illness.

>that obsessing about eating healthy food is considered a mental illness.

Mental illnesses, at least in present times, are defined and diagnosed when they are an impediment to functioning in a normal manner in society. A lot of people like to say, for example, that they "have OCD" but a psychiatrist would only diagnose you as having OCD if it cripples your life, not just if you have a mild obsession like double checking if you closed your door before leaving home.

In the case of something like orthorexia, it would be a mental illness when it reaches the point where you think of it for a large % of your days, that you would argue and get angry at people for not sharing your views on food, that you would get paranoid and be unable to participate at a family dinner and many other things that add up and make a person maladjusted in society. Can you really say she was not a mentally ill person ?

http://nasimabc.com/sitebuilder/images/car_attack_nasim2-426...

>"my car attacked by anti vegan animal business supporting criminals"

Her obsessions ran deep into paranoia that people who were not vegans were out to get her. This is the true face of mental illness. Let's not downplay the realities of it. Someone "obsessed with healthy food" as you put it can be more mentally ill and dysfunctioning in society than someone who's fat and eat fast food stuff on a daily basis. It all depends on how deep your obsession runs. The fat person might still be able to not think about food much of the day and function, work, have hobbies outside of food.

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

Can we honestly and objectively say that being extremely health conscious is a sickness while habitually eating extremely unhealthy food to the point of obesity is not?

>>"my car attacked by anti vegan animal business supporting criminals"

>Her obsessions ran deep into paranoia that people who were not vegans were out to get her.

So anyone who suspects their car was vandalized by someone who disliked a controversial bumper sticker on it is mentally ill?

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