“‘Vegan Bodybuilder’: How YouTube Attacker, Nasim Aghdam, Went Viral in Iran”, 2018-04-04 (; backlinks):
In Iran, she was known as Green Nasim, a social media star with followings on YouTube, on Instagram and elsewhere. · In the United States, she cast a very different profile, a proponent of vegan diets, animal rights and home exercise who had increasingly become agitated by one of the tech companies that helped give her a platform… · The police said Ms. Aghdam’s anger over what she believed to be unfair treatment by YouTube had set her on a 500-mile drive from her home near San Diego to YouTube’s offices on the northern edge of Silicon Valley. · “People like me are not good for big business, like for animal business, medicine business and for many other businesses. That’s why they are discriminating and censoring us”, she said in a video posted online last year criticizing YouTube. “This is what they are doing to vegan activists and many other people who try to promote healthy, humane and smart living.”
…Ms. Aghdam was in her late 30s. In several of her videos, she said she was born in Iran, in the city of Urmia, where most people also speak Turkish, as she does in some of her videos. Ms. Aghdam had YouTube pages in Persian, Turkish and English. She explained that she and her family were members of the Baha’i faith, which faces persecution in Iran, a country with a Muslim majority. · Several of her colorful—and sometimes bizarre—videos had gone viral in Iran. Her website, which said it was quoting Western news outlets, identified her as “the first Persian female vegan bodybuilder.” · “Now the media will be faced with a new type of Iranian female which does not fit within any of their usual categorizations”, a Twitter user named Katayoon said Wednesday. · “This was shocking and saddening”, one Iranian, Bahare, wrote on Twitter of Ms. Aghdam. “We laughed so much but now it turns out all those videos were so serious for herself.” · Ms. Aghdam became especially famous for one clip in which she wears a revealing purple dress, showing cleavage, and begins to slowly strip off her clothes to reveal a pair of fake plastic breasts. “Don’t trust your eyes”, read a caption in English on the clip.
…Her personal website and videos posted to YouTube and elsewhere were filled with complaints about YouTube. “When searching for my website in google, at top of link they add ‘an error occurred’ but there is no error!” a website under Ms. Aghdam’s name, NasimeSabz.com, said in February 2016. “They add it to keep you from my visiting my site.” · Life in the United States had not been good, she said in one video from March 30. “There they kill you by ax”, she said of Iran. “Here they kill you with cotton”, referring to an Iranian expression meaning dying by something that you do not know is dangerous. · In another video, she responded to viewers who had begun to wonder if she was mentally ill: “I don’t have any special mental or physical disease, but I live on a planet filled with disease, disorders, perversions and injustices.” · The American dream appeared to be tarnished for her after she began to face hurdles in the United States. · “If you are superficial, you will think it is heaven here, that you can go naked outside and have sex left and right like other animals without any morality”, she said in one video in Persian. “But if you enter the system, you will see that it is worse than Iran”, she said. “Those who want to inform people against the system and big companies get censored.”