It has never been more obvious that the internet brings out the worst in people than right now. The rise in popularity of the app Nextdoor, a social media platform on which people are only able to interact with people from their neighborhood, has made local social media more popular. The result is a lot of whining and, unsurprisingly, racism. Alongside Nextdoor, the website Reddit has pages for almost every city and school, including both the University of Oregon and Eugene.
Nextdoor launched in 2008 and its user base has been slowly growing since. The app functions similarly to Facebook, allowing users to post and respond to others. The focus of the app is intended to be neighborhood issues. The Nextdoor website reads, “We believe that by bringing neighbors together, we can cultivate a kinder world.” Yet, the focus on local issues means moderators often remove conversations about national or global topics.This led to the continual removal of posts about Black Lives Matter under the guise that it is a national issue and should be discussed elsewhere.
Nextdoor also came under fire by Bloomberg and other organizations for having an option to forward information to the police. This option was removed because it encouraged individuals to profile people in their neighborhood.
Though Nextdoor has a rough past, the pandemic has made the app more popular than ever. With reportedly over 10 million users, it is obvious that many people have turned to Nextdoor for social interaction during quarantine.
This social interaction comes with a side of both casual and overt racism though, as many people have expressed how Nextdoor is a platform for wealthy White people to continue alienating people of color and stigmatizing poverty. Even Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has tweeted that Nextdoor “needs to publicly deal with their Karen problem.”
‘Karen’ is a recently coined term for someone who is overly involved and concerned about other people’s business, often leading to police involvement. Even the entertainment publication TMZ has highlighted Karens needlessly calling the police on people of color.
This term might be offensive to some, but it is apt to describe many of the interactions that happen on Nextdoor.
Interestingly enough, the Reddit pages for Eugene and UO are very different from Nextdoor. The Eugene subreddit is, for the most part, host to respectful discourse. In fact, the most popular post on the subreddit rd members of the Proud Boys, designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The group caused a store in downtown Eugene to close early one night by threatening customers because store employees refused to remove signs in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. All of the responses to this post are in full agreement, and it feels like the Eugene community is actually unified.
The UO subreddit, which is much smaller than Eugene’s, also has a community that is more respectful than Nextdoor. The page is populated by posts about the ills of the university or Michael Schill, but no Karens.
Location based social media has the potential to bring people together in a way that traditional social media cannot. In a time when we are deprived of social connection it makes sense that these platforms see increased use, but Nextdoor is too problematic in its current state. The Nextdoor app as it exists right now is only furthering racial and class divides in a time when these divisions are already more volatile than usual.
The CEO of Nextdoor has apologized for moderators censoring Black Lives Matter posts and promised both unconscious bias training for their moderators and more robust AI to combat racism. The problem is that this training does not appear to be required, and AI has been shown to be only somewhat effective at censoring racism on social media. In hopes of rectifying these oversights, there is a petition on The Action Network to require all Nextdoor moderators to undergo implicit bias and anti-racism training.
Nextdoor needs to either hire more moderators to make sure discourse is civil or remove the barrier to entry so it is not just wealthy homeowners.
