nextdoor – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Won’t Someone Please Think Of The Adults?

from the ctrl-alt-speech dept

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund.

Filed Under: age estimation, age verification, digital services act, dsa, ireland, nist, social media
Companies: nextdoor, telegram, tiktok, twitter, x

Content Moderation Case Study: Nextdoor Faces Criticism From Volunteer Moderators Over Its Support Of Black Lives Matter (June 2020)

from the everything-is-politics dept

Summary: Nextdoor is the local ?neighborhood-focused? social network, which allows for hyper-local communication within a neighborhood. The system works by having volunteer moderators from each neighborhood, known as ?leads.? For many years, Nextdoor has faced accusations of perpetuating racial stereotyping from people using the platform to report sightings of black men and women in their neighborhood as somehow ?suspicious.?

With the various Black Lives Matter protests spreading around the country following the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, many companies have put out messages of support for the Black Lives Matter movement, including Nextdoor, which put up a short blog post entitled Black Lives Matter, with a few links to various groups supporting the movement.

This happened around the same time that the site started facing criticism because users posting support of the Black Lives Matter movement were finding their own posts being removed as leads were claiming that posts about the protests violated guidelines not to discuss ?national and state? political issues (even when the posts were about local protests).

Meanwhile, many of the ?leads? were using their own forum to complain about the company?s public support for Black Lives Matter at the same time that they believed discussing such issues on the platform violated rules. The ensuing discussion (which in many ways mimicked the wider national discussion) highlighted how frequently local leads are bringing their own political viewpoints into their moderation decisions.

When the company also added posts to local Nextdoor communities that highlighted black-owned businesses, as part of its support for Black Lives Matter, it again angered some leads who felt that such posts violated the rules they had been told to enforce.

Decisions to be made by Nextdoor:

Questions and policy implications to consider:

Resolution: Nextdoor has continued to support the Black Lives Matter movement, and Gordon Strause, the company?s director of community, went onto the forum where some leads were complaining to explain the company?s position and why they were supporting Black Lives Matter, and to push back against those who argued that the movement itself was discriminatory, while also highlighting how there were a variety of perspectives, and there was value in learning about other viewpoints:

In an attempt to quell the furor, Gordon Strause, the company?s director of community, wrote on the leads forum on Monday from his ?own perspective? and not ?on behalf of Nextdoor.? Noting that ?it?s of course absolutely true all live [sic] matters, whether they are black, white, brown, blue, or any other color,? he explained his views on Black Lives Matter.

?The goal of the BLM movement, at least as I understand it, is simply to make the point that black lives matter as much as any other lives but too often in America that isn?t actually what happens in practice and this dynamic needs to change,? he wrote.

?While no one that I know or respect believes that looting helps anything, there are folks that I respect (including people in my own family) who believe that riots may be a necessary step to help the country finally understand the scale of injustice that has been happening,” he wrote, “while other folks I respect believe that the riots will be counterproductive and will only undermine the goals they are meant to achieve.? Strause then went on to recommend a book from psychologist Jonathan Haidt and urged leads ?to listen and not to judge.?

?While Nextdoor is generally not the place for discussions of national issues, I think it?s going to [sic] hard to restrain those discussions in the coming days without being perceived as taking sides. So rather than trying to do so, I would recommend that Leads instead focus on a different goal: keeping the discussions as civil and issue focused (rather than personality focused) as possible,? he wrote.

Filed Under: black lives matter, case studies, content moderation, local, politics, racism, social media
Companies: nextdoor

Nextdoor Is Courting Cops And Public Officials Using All-Expenses-Paid Trips To Its Headquarters

from the lobbying-for-a-worse-America dept

A COP IN EVERY HOUSE: that’s the American dream. Maybe they can’t enter the home, what with the Fourth Amendment and all, but they can be invited to every online get-together thrown by apps that promise neighborhood unity while asking law enforcement to get in on the action.

Ring, Amazon’s doorbell/camera company, has made the relationship between neighborhood “sharing” and law enforcement explicit. It’s right there in the term sheets. While Ring takes the PR reins to steer the official discourse, it’s offering cops steeper discounts on Ring cameras they can hand out to citizens in exchange for pushing citizens to sign up for Neighbors, Ring’s snitch app. Once attached to the app, Ring makes sharing of camera footage seamless and encourages homeowners to report suspicious people and activities. Unsurprisingly, many of the suspicious people reported are minorities.

It’s not just Ring and Neighbors, as Citylab has discovered. Nextdoor — a hyperlocal Facebook clone (and hotbed of bigotry) — is courting cops as forcibly silenced partners in its plans to increase its user base.

Charles Husted, the chief of police in Sedona, Arizona, couldn’t contain his excitement. He had just been accepted into the Public Agencies Advisory Council for Nextdoor, the neighborhood social networking app.

“You’re the best!!! A great Christmas present,” he wrote in a December email to Parisa Safarzadeh, Government Relations Manager for Nextdoor.com Inc., obtained by CityLab through a public records request.

The invitation was too good to turn down: an all expenses paid trip to Nextdoor’s headquarters in San Francisco. The company covered the costs for all invitees. In exchange for their participation, Nextdoor picked up the estimated $16,900 tab. And it swore participants to silence with a non-disclosure agreement.

Unfortunately for Nextdoor, this doesn’t cover public records, which is what Citylab used to uncover this unseemly relationship between the social media company and US law enforcement. Chief Husted has no regrets — or at least none he’s willing to share publicly, possibly because of the NDA he signed. From what he can see, this isn’t questionable. It’s just a step in the right direction.

Husted says that leaning on social media — not just Nextdoor, but also Facebook or Twitter — in the line of duty is an inevitability of the current age. “It’s naive to think as public safety folks that we can keep doing our work the same as we have for years and years,” he said. “We have to evolve with the times, and the times have to do with social media: That’s where our communities are at. We have to find a way to be there too.”

He’s right. Social media can’t be ignored. But Nextdoor isn’t inviting anyone from its largest group of stakeholders: members of the public. Instead, it’s paying for government employees and officials to travel to San Francisco to hear its pitch for greater government involvement in a private company’s communications platform. Nextdoor may claim to be connecting locals with each other, but its efforts are focused on roping in the people who are supposed to be serving its users: public servants.

Robbie Turner, a senior city strategist with Nextdoor, wrote to Husted that when expanding Nextdoor’s reach to Canada, the company was using “the same strategy we used when we first launched in the U.S. — recruit the major Police Departments and have them help us grow membership and engagement quickly.”

That’s the bottom line: bumps in usage and users. Turning public entities into tools of corporations is seldom a good idea and it’s certainly a bad idea when Nextdoor’s user base appears to be willing to turn themselves into snitches at the drop of a hyperlink. If cops want to break bias patterns, they need to steer clear of unsubstantiated reports from biased Nextdoor users. Instead, Nextdoor is encouraging police to embrace the platform and all the problems inherent in its “see something, say something” nudges.

As for other public officials who took advantage of Nextdoor’s all-expense-paid offer, they’re having a problem seeing a problem with any of this. Never mind the optics. Officials want everyone to focus only on the letter of the law, which contains enough loopholes to drive an entire junket through.

Several public officials who were part of the Public Agencies Advisory Council say that the trip didn’t conflict with any city policies. Lara Foss, a corporate communications marketing consultant for the City of Austin, told CityLab that since the trip was work-related, it did not violate the city’s gift policy. Sedona’s Husted also said there were no endorsement regulations that prohibited him from participating. Katie Nelson, social media and public relations coordinator for the Mountain View Police Department in California, said that because the city’s policy prohibits taking paid trips on clocked time, she took a few days off from work to participate in the San Francisco meet-up.

Being wined and dined on a corporate tab makes people more receptive to their pitches. Everyone knows this. And that’s why nearly everyone thinks things like this reek of buying off cops and politicians. Everyone, that is, but the cops and politicians being seduced by a whirlwind trip to a tech company’s headquarters.

Once the dirty has been done, it’s time to let what happened at Nextdoor HQ stay at Nextdoor HQ. This isn’t so much a slogan as it is an existential lawsuit threat. Shut up, says Nextdoor, or it will be more than an un-invite to future events. It will be your proverbial ass in a litigation sling. Public officials owe a duty of transparency to their constituents. But Nextdoor is appending a whole lot of asterisks to the duties of public officials. The exceptions include a completely separate arm of the government.

In the terms of Nextdoor’s NDA, advisory council members are not allowed to release public statements about the partnership without the consent of Nextdoor, nor are they able to follow a court order to disclose any information deemed confidential by Nextdoor without alerting the company first.

And Nextdoor has made it easy for its snitchiest users to bring the government in on conversations other Nextdoor users might have thought were private. The platform can’t allow users to file actual police reports but it does give users an option to screw other users over. A feature called “Forward to Police” allows users to send copies of private conversations to officers monitoring accounts. This feature is activated by police departments themselves, so those willing to further demonstrate their indifference for the people they serve can give people an one-click solution for all their snitching needs.

Sure, any participant in a private conversation could take screenshots and hand them to law enforcement. Removing the minimal tech hurdles, however, encourages people to use this option anytime they come across something that bothers them. It’s a “speak to the manager” button, but one that potentially involves government-blessed use of deadly force. If people don’t even have to leave their chairs to engage in SWATting-adjacent activities, they won’t. Giving them a button just increases the chance someone’s going to get hurt or killed.

At the end of the day, it’s problematic all over. Public officials are endorsing a platform that paid to have them feel good about it — both by covering their trip to San Francisco and by giving them the impression they are doing something to make their communities better by making them members of a private company’s “Public Advisory Council.”

Filed Under: law enforcement, nextdoor, police, social media, surveillance
Companies: nextdoor

Selling Fear? There's An App For That

from the BE-A-PART-OF-PRISON-PIPELINE! dept

Fear sells.

Fear has always sold. It has sold wars to the public, both real and imagined. It has propelled the endless funding of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. It has sold the killing of unarmed citizens by police officers to courts. It has sold the diminishment of our Constitutional rights, most notably at our borders. It has sold surveillance creep — the steady encroachment of cameras in public areas, increasingly coupled with tech that makes anonymity a historical relic.

It has sold newspapers and brought eyeballs to newscasts. As the public has shifted its news consumption to the web, the fear salesmen have followed, ensuring what bleeds still leads, even online.

The public still buys it, even when the facts don’t back up the narrative. A decade of historically low crime levels has made little dent in the public perception that we live in a country overrun by drug cartels, sex traffickers, and assorted lowlifes hellbent on separating us from our possessions and lives.

All of this information is a Google search away, but it’s ignored in favor of what still brings viewers to websites and funding to government agencies. This would all be sad enough if it weren’t for a new wave of tech companies behaving like newspapers riding the fine line between information and sensationalism.

Rani Molla’s report for Vox about the rise of snitch apps and the use of “neighborhood” platforms to encourage racial stereotyping under the guise of “safety” is a depressing read. But it’s a worth a read nonetheless. People apparently love to be afraid, and there’s a long list of tech companies willing to indulge this urge.

Violent crime in the US is at its lowest rate in decades. But you wouldn’t know that from a crop of increasingly popular social media apps that are forming around crime.

Apps like Nextdoor, Citizen, and Amazon Ring’s Neighbors — all of which allow users to view local crime in real time and discuss it with people nearby — are some of the most downloaded social and news apps in the US, according to rankings from the App Store and Google Play.

This is just part of it. But it’s an unhealthy start. Citizen, for instance, used to do business as “Vigilante,” so that gives you some idea of the mindset some of these apps/tech appeal to. Amazon is upping the ante further than the rest, though. It’s turning its doorbell cameras into reality TV for crime junkies.

It recently advertised an editorial position that would coordinate news coverage on crime, specifically based around its Ring video doorbell and Neighbors, its attendant social media app. Neighbors alerts users to local crime news from “unconfirmed sources” and is full of Amazon Ring videos of people stealing Amazon packages and “suspicious” brown people on porches. “Neighbors is more than an app, it’s the power of your community coming together to keep you safe and informed,” it boasts.

Apps like these turn isolated incidents that don’t even amount to a rounding error in local crime stats into a narrative that users’ neighborhoods are full of suspicious people doing suspicious things. This kickstarts a vicious circle where cops are called on “suspicious brown people,” leading to increased profiling of brown people… which leads to arrest stats that seem to prove brown people are more dangerous. And Amazon is there to get this ball rolling by hiring an editorial team to drum up fear using doorbell camera footage. What a time to be alive.

The tech revolution has made bigotry more efficient.

A recent Motherboard article found that the majority of people posted as “suspicious” on Neighbors in a gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood were people of color.

Nextdoor has been plagued by this sort of stereotyping.

Citizen is full of comments speculating on the race of people in 9-1-1 alerts.

To be fair, these apps and tech offerings didn’t create the problem. It was always there. They’ve just made it worse by tapping into this thick vein of fear and bigotry that is likely being underserved by local journalism. As Molla points out, small news entities have been dying off, leaving a void that’s been filled by neighborhood-focused social media outlets. Like anything else, the potential of positive development was always there. It’s just that those who use the services the most tend to be the type who view people of other races, creeds, etc. as inherently suspicious.

The solution, unfortunately, is better inputs. The researchers Molla spoke to suggest “better media literacy” and “more mindful consumption of news.” Let’s be honest: if those are the choices, it’s never going to happen. The selling of a crime-filled America happened as crime rates dropped precipitously. Journalists sold it. Politicians sold it. Massive echo chambers were constructed and the apps that might have disrupted this have instead, for the most part, amplified the echoes.

The information has always been out there. It’s just always ignored by those whose personal beliefs can’t be swayed by stats and alternate viewpoints. Tech isn’t going to fix it. It’s up to us, as individuals, to try to pierce through this haze created by hundreds of entities whose existence depends on the public believing the nation is unsafe. And that’s the hitch: you’re not just going up against friends and neighbors. You’re going up against entrenched beliefs held by government agencies and media concerns that have monetized fear successfully for decades.

Filed Under: fear, neighbors, overhype, social media
Companies: amazon, citizen, nextdoor