Content Moderation Case Study: Nextdoor Faces Criticism From Volunteer Moderators Over Its Support Of Black Lives Matter (June 2020)
Furnished content.
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.
Black lives matter.
You are not alone.
Everyone should feel safe in their neighborhood.
Reach out. Listen. Take action. pic.twitter.com/PVCYdA9Xrj— Nextdoor (@Nextdoor) May 31, 2020
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.
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