YouTube Employees Regularly Threatened by 'Unstable' Creators and Vloggers

YouTube employees are regularly threatened by disgruntled creators who use the video-sharing service as a source of income.

According to Business Insider, YouTube creators have a history of being aggressive and threatening towards staff. Incidences of abuse had never elevated to physical harm until earlier this month, when 38-year-old Nasim Aghdam shot and wounded three staffers before taking her own life.

Aghdam told friends she was frustrated by YouTube's constant changes and a recent decision to demonetize some channels. Aghdam believed YouTube was out to ruin her life.

YouTube's first community manager, Mia Quagliarello, was abused by a suspended account holder and even had her family threatened. The account holder set up a website containing demeaning and threatening images aimed at Quagliarello and her family. She worked at YouTube between 2006 and 2011.

"I forwarded [the threats] to Google security and they took it super seriously," Quagliarello told Business Insider. "They sent over someone, like an ex-cop type, to sit on my block 24-7."

The guard was stationed outside the house for three days.

On one occasion, a YouTube creator confronted YouTube's former head of advertising and creator marketing, Eric Meyerson, and promised to "destroy him". "He was in a really bad frame of mind," Meyerson told Business Insider. "He said something to the effect that 'if you keeping fucking with my channel I'm going to destroy you. I'm going to hurt you,' and he implied that he was going to take it out on employees of YouTube."

"Although it was a threat and obviously I want to take it seriously, we were used to a lot of volatility among the creator community."

According to one anonymous former YouTube employee, all social networks are susceptible to backlash. "When you have a platform that serves everyone, there are going to be people who are emotionally unstable," the source said. "Whenever platforms change, you get a lot of emails, some of them rational, some of them irrational."

YouTube updated its monetization targets in January and now requires creators to have 4,000 combined watched hours in the past 12 months, along with a minimum of 1000 subscribers. The changes officially came into effect on February 20. According to YouTube, 99 per cent of the channels affected were earning less than $100 per year.

Based on the socialblade.com calculator, YouTubers need to attract around 40,000 hits per day to earn the median US annual income ($59,000). Hits are not as simple as clicking refresh, however, since YouTube only counts views if the audience pays attention for at least 30 seconds.