Those who saw, mocked and ignored online videos express regret, remorse
Anyone who has spent time on the internet has come across something that confounds them – a blog post that doesn’t seem to make any sense, a rant that goes off the rails, a Youtube video so strange it’s hard to tell if the person behind it is sincere or creating performance art.
Often, this content becomes the butt of online jokes, fodder not just for viewers who can’t look away but also those who choose to share and mock it.
For some who stumbled upon Nasim Aghdam’s prolific library of online videos, that wasn’t an uncommon reaction.
Aghdam used Youtube to espouse the benefits of veganism and exercise with videos that were at once surreal and unhinged. In one clip, pulsing electronic music plays in the background while Aghdam stares expressionless at the camera. In another, she dances wearing a sheep mask in front of a picture of a frowning cow before the words “Go Vegan, Go Healthy & Humane” appear across the screen – exactly the kind of fodder that internet users love to point and gawk at.
That was before Aghdam opened fire with a handgun at Youtube’s San Bruno campus Tuesday, wounding three people before taking her own life.
Those who had seen her clips are now taking stock of their own reactions.
“I feel guilty,” Sahar Motallebi wrote on Facebook. “Although I only laughed at her and never shared her posts … we all saw there is an issue with her and we only entertained ourselves or kept quiet about the cyberbullying going on.”
Viewers of Aghdam’s videos took to social media in the days after her attack, admitting to having made fun of her. In some cases, they appeared to be grappling with remorse. Others seemed to be coming Nasim Najafi Aghdam, right, takes part in an animal rights protest outside Camp Pendleton in 2009.
to terms with how what they viewed as an internet joke could have ended so tragically.
“Some of her videos in Farsi had got famous in the Persian community because she acted weird and was talking crazy. People were actually laughing at her stupid videos,” one Reddit user wrote.
“Holy crap, I remember that woman. People on the Turkish internet used to make fun of her,” wrote another.
Aghdam’s videos had made their way back to her native Iran – where social media channels are often blocked – and to Turkey, where a fellow Youtube creator derided her creations in a video of his own. He described one of her videos as “something I can only see in my nightmares.”
“If you watch a video of her five times, she’ll appear under your bed,” the fellow Youtuber says in his September 2016 post.
Such treatment of a random online personality isn’t unusual, said Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, a Stanford University psychiatrist and author of “Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-personality.”
“The negative traits that surface on social media are not new,” Aboujaoude said.