Hosts Grant Stinchfield and Chuck Holton appeared on NRATV Wednesday afternoon and linked YouTube’s new restrictions on gun videos for the shooting that left one dead and three injured at the company’s corporate headquarters in San Bruno, California Tuesday. The hosts claimed that the new policies have opened YouTube up to “a lot of hatred.”
“You and I were both very careful not to speculate about what happened. Not to call into question what happened,” Stinchfield said to Holton. “And yet while we were being very careful, while we were asking questions and waiting for answers, the left was out there literally pushing this narrative that the shooting was somehow the NRA’s fault and that I need to apologize for a tweet that NRATV sent out of one of my videos.”
“And, you know, I have talked about this before, YouTube making these changes where they’re going from being a platform for videos to being a publisher of videos,” Holton replied. “Meaning that they are starting to censor content here and there, whatever, actually opens them up to liability and it opens them up to a lot of hatred from people around the world.”
The hosts were linking the shooting to new YouTube restrictions on gun videos hosted on the platform, a move gun rights activists called “worrisome.”
After the Parkland shooting, YouTube announced it will ban videos that promote or link to websites selling firearms and bump stocks. Videos instructing viewers how to assemble firearms are also prohibited.
As Bloomberg notes, YouTube has long been a haven for gun-related videos. A search for “how to build a gun” yields roughly 25 million results on the platform.
Police confirmed the shooter was 39-year-old Nasim Najafi Aghdam, of San Diego, California.
“She was upset with some of the practices or policies that the company had employed,” San Bruno chief of police Ed Barberini said in an interview early Wednesday morning on ABC’s Good Morning America.
Aghdam’s father told the Bay Area News Group that she was angry with YouTube after the company de-monetized videos she had posted on the platform because of graphic or adult content.
In other words, the shooter was upset that she wasn’t getting paid for her videos on veganism, not because she couldn’t post videos about guns.
The new policies about gun videos are set to be implemented sometime in April.