Whether the city continues its partnership with online residential community site Nextdoor.com appears to be up in the air. While the site has its uses, fostering inclusiveness at public meetings is not currently one of them.
Nextdoor connects residents with each other in neighborhoods in cities across the country through specific, semi-private groups. Users can seek assistance with a home project, announce junk they want to give away, complain about city services and even notify their neighbors when a crime has occurred or when some shady guy lingers too long near their mailboxes.
For the last year and a half, the City of Seattle has been partnering with Nextdoor, starting with its police department, which can issue communications to specific neighborhood groups and also field questions about crime by Nextdoor members.
While there are certainly great arguments that can be made regarding how Nextdoor works at building a sense of community in Seattle’s numerous neighborhoods, issues regarding exclusivity and fostering “paranoid hysteria,” as Mayor Ed Murray recently put it, have recently been put in the spotlight.
With the Seattle Police Department (SPD) trying to improve its transparency with the community, Chief Kathleen O’Toole’s Feb. 17 online town hall meeting about crime certainly failed at that. Ironically, a huge topic of discussion was the city’s homeless crisis, with those facing homelessness automatically removed from the conversation due to the fact they have no residence and were, therefore, unable to attend.
Local The C is for Crank blogger Erica Barnett took it upon herself to report on the supposedly public meeting with a public official, which resulted in her being temporarily banned from Nextdoor by its administrators for violating the site’s terms of service: what happens in Nextdoor stays in Nextdoor.
Barnett’s account has since been reinstated, and the incident prompted Murray to order a formal review of the city’s partnership with the private social media site, which he announced to The C is for Crank last week. Nextdoor is also apparently reconsidering its privacy policy after Barnett pointed out that closing the virtual door on a public town hall meeting with O’Toole violated Washington disclosure laws.
Murray was reported as saying he’d already had concerns about Nextdoor prior to the botched town hall — where some less-than-tolerant views on the homeless population were shared — due to members in neighborhoods like Magnolia and Ballard “working themselves into a paranoid hysteria” over perceived increases in crime. These perceptions were created by postings on the site, rather than the city’s crime stats, which show rates of crime going down, according to the mayor.
It’s certainly easy to see how people on a private social media site can have mixed perceptions about crime in their neighborhood when they become too reliant on it as a one-stop source of information — much like someone who only watches Fox News could develop the false belief that the president is a Muslim communist.
SPD and many other city departments have plenty of online venues where they find themselves busy reporting facts and dispelling fiction. It’s worth considering whether Nextdoor should remain one of them.
While it may turn out that Nextdoor isn’t a good fit for the city as a communications tool, we can still depend on it to find a new couch or shame that guy in the neighborhood who refuses to pick up his dog’s droppings. You know who you are.