YouTube recently cracked down on firearms videos on its website after the school shooting in Parkland, Fla.
About two weeks before a shooting Tuesday at YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, the company rolled out new restrictions on videos involving weapons and firearms.
Authorities said the female shooter at YouTube’s campus injured others and apparently shot and killed herself on Tuesday. They haven’t revealed what may have motivated her, and they aren’t linking the incident to YouTube’s recent crackdown on gun-related videos.
YouTube’s new restrictions last month on firearm videos, however, drew the video-sharing platform into the nation’s heated discussion over gun control — after the Parkland, Florida, high school shooting in February and the subsequent March for Our Lives rallies across the country.
YouTube in March announced it would prohibit content intending to sell firearms through direct sales or by linking to sites that sell these items and providing information on how to assemble or install firearms and their accessories.
“We routinely make updates and adjustments to our enforcement guidelines across all of our policies,” a YouTube spokeswoman said in a statement at the time. “While we’ve long prohibited the sale of firearms, we recently notified creators of updates we will be making around content promoting the sale or manufacture of firearms and their accessories.”
Gun rights advocacy organizations then accused YouTube of censorship and infringing on their constitutional rights.
“YouTube’s announcement this week of a new firearms content policy is troubling,” said the National Shooting Sports Foundation in a statement. “Much like Facebook, YouTube now acts as a virtual public square. The exercise of what amounts to censorship, then, can legitimately be viewed as the stifling of commercial free speech, which has constitutional protection. Such actions also impinge on the Second Amendment.”
Previously — in October, following the Las Vegas shooting that left 58 people dead — YouTube had banned video tutorials showing how to install “bump stocks” — devices which enable semiautomatic weapons to be fired like they are fully automatic.
“In the wake of the recent tragedy in Las Vegas, we took a closer look at videos that demonstrate how to convert firearms to make them fire more quickly and we expanded our existing policy to prohibit these videos,” said a YouTube spokesperson to TechCrunch after the announcement.
In 2016, Facebook rolled out similar restrictions to YouTube’s, banning private gun sales on Facebook and Instagram.