How Nextdoor reduced racist posts
fusion.net
fusion.net
I think there's a problem with the police, not Nextdoor, here. I mean, ok, somebody asked to check out suspicious person (and police, with their experience, should know how (non-)reliable such reports usually are) and they did. But picking the person up - which I understand means detaining the person - is decision that the police officer responding is making. No reporter can make such decision. And if this decision leads to innocent man borrowing a ladder being detained - this is not really reporter's fault, it's the police being unprofessional.
> your opinion isn't valuable.
Unlike yours, which is even though I obviously take the effort of not forming opinion before I have the information, while you seem to have formed opinion not only about the situation, but even about my motivations in discussing it, without any information to go on. If you think that makes your opinion more valuable, I think you are sadly mistaken.
Was that racist? Maybe...
Maybe not...
The thing is: We don't know.
It's easy for armchair lawyers to pass judgement... but it becomes more difficult when you actually realize that one call isn't a pattern.
By that I take it to mean that they were neighbors. So if your neighbor stops by to borrow a ladder, would you call the cops on him/her?
Imagine the case where you haven't met the neighbor before, you notice them before they knock and they look like they've been hanging around there, and it's really hard to figure out what they're trying to communicate.
Someone hearing about this might reasonably report it as "wow, calling the cops on a neighbor asking for a ladder", while you might see it as "weirdo I've never seen, who looked to be casing my place, and stammered out some BS excuse about wanting a ladder when I confronted him."
I find it hard to believe that anyone goes about their daily lives with that level of paranoia towards every new person they meet. I think it's much more likely that it's because he's black. . . especially considering the background of negative race relations and stereotypes about black people and crime.
If you've never been in a neighborhood with high crime, or where scam artists have preyed on the naive, great, but don't act judgemental toward those who may have.
But making an argument based on speculation is not usually helpful.
It's clear that she was in the wrong for being bitchy on social media, but how could she have predicted the outcome? In what sane world do the police seek out unfounded accusations on social media then act on them?
I don't think it's hard to predict that police will harass a black person in a white neighborhood if someone complains, and my guess is that it's not the first time it's happened in that particular neighborhood.
> In what sane world do the police seek out unfounded accusations on social media then act on them?
I would guess it's not the first time the police pulled a report from Nextdoor.
> In what sane world
I don't know, but if that's your premise, this particular world must be very confusing for you ... :)
A classic, recurring bug in the design of the human brain, one that gets triggered in me all the time, is that we naturally conceive of the whole world being like the tiny part that we experience; it takes serious effort to workaround that bug and walk in another person's shoes. Personally, I try to look for a specific signal: When I solve a problem - one I haven't experienced myself - by minimizing someone else's experience of it. e.g., 'That's not really a big deal.' Well, due to the bug referenced above it's not a big deal for me, but that attitude gets humanity in a lot of deep sh*t.
Thus, I'm not going to tell the GP that it's not a big deal; I don't have to live under constant suspicion every time I'm in public - though I imagine that would be awful. I do know that harassment of black people by law enforcement (and civilians), which often results from suspicion, is a very big and widespread problem. Look up 'driving while black', or 'stop and frisk'; you can read many, many stories of people being searched dozens of times, being humiliated such as being made to drop their pants on the street for a 'search', being assaulted ...
Think of it this way: Stop & frisk is a very widespread police tactic. So has it ever happened to you? Or to anyone know know? Even once? For most people reading this, the answer will indicate the bubble we live in. I'm pretty sure that if some attorney on Wall Street was stopped and frisked, or made to drop his pants, even once, the program would be over by the time he buckled them back up.
> To take it to the level of mortal danger
This isn't a realistic standard. Most serious problems in the world are not mortal danger, from assault to rape to being imprisoned, harassed, forced to eat in a different restaurant because of the color of your skin ...
I never said it's not a big deal. In fact, I said exactly the opposite of it: "It's a problem, true". Were you meaning to respond to somebody else?
> I'm pretty sure that if some attorney on Wall Street was stopped and frisked, or made to drop his pants, even once, the program would be over by the time he buckled them back up.
Unfortunately it's not as rosey as you describe - look up civil forfeiture and how many various people got hit by it and how this practice still persists though it is nothing but legalized highway robbery. Check out how easy is to get hit by something like "structuring", or google "three felonies a day" and follow the rabbit hole from there. But that would take us way offtopic. We know police in US has serious issues, both with race and with corruption. We know there are a lot of factors that make people of certain descents - such as African Americans - suffer more from these issues.
My point is not to deny any of that - quite the contrary. My point is that these issues are police issues, not the problem of whoever dared to call the police when they thought they were in danger. Even if they were mistaken on that part and there was no real danger.
Also in other "reported by neighbor for walking around" stories of this sort: An Indian man visiting his son was reported as a 'suspicious black man walking around' – and was bodyslammed to the ground by a police officer for "not co-operating", which ended up leaving him partially paralyzed. The cop walked free. [1]
Maybe the police themselves should implement filters like Nextdoor.
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/assault-charges-dr...
Residents now constantly post photos of "suspicious" people and vehicles with responders telling them to phone the police.
It depends on the police. In many places the police have long practiced bogus harassment and arrest of black people (and other minorities), and this wouldn't change it.
The real role of police, in those places, is effectively to suppress people whom the political class in power find to be 'undesirable', not only criminals but homeless, political protestors, minorities, etc. In those places, the 'bogus' reports on Nextdoor are business as usual.
By the way, the political class in power (e.g., middle-class whites in some places) don't always consciously think about 'suppression'. They feel uncomfortable around the homeless person and unconsciously rationalize a reason to have them removed (he could attack someone, it interferes with local businesses, it's better for him to be in a shelter, etc.).
Generally, that's always true. Whoever has the power writes the rules.
> instinctively assumes
> all police do
I don't feel like that tells me much, other than you are pissed off. I hope tomorrow is better.
One of the neighborhood had a series of break ins to cars one night that got the entire neighborhood talking. Eventually, there was one older lady who chimed in that she'd seen 3 black teenagers in a pickup truck the day before. Somebody else chimed in that they were at her son's birthday party and then multiple other people in the neighborhood scolded her for jumping to a conclusion like like that (about as tactfully as they could).
That was 2 years ago and despite periodic crime reports from the surrounding neighborhoods we haven't heard another profiling peep. Considering where it seemed like things started I've been impressed to see the virtually immediate correction.
We have one older guy in our neighborhood who calls the cops on EVERYBODY. At some point it's just the person.
Nextdoor should monetize their dataset. I could see some value in having a database of the irrational and racist people. It could be as simple as NextDoor selling access to a neighborhood you're considering buying in for a limited time. I suspect it might be really difficult to find a "good" neighborhood but some are certainly worse than others.
- They claim to have reduced "racist posts" by 75%.
- They say they accomplished this by asking extra questions whenever a racial descriptor was used.
In other words they simply made it harder to post when using a racial descriptor than not and claim this is a great reduction in racist posting. As a software developer I'm well aware of one thing: the more complicated I make a feature's interface be, the fewer people are going to use it. Without them having enabled the extra difficulty for all posting regardless of having used the racial descriptor or not, they're simply looking at people who don't post more using race not because they're racist but because they're placing an artificial hurdle associated with that.
Now, if they simply wanted for people not to describe race they should've simply removed it from the options; they seem to be so proud of effectively doing that but in a (thinly) veiled way, as I understand it they're saying that any posts that include race of the individual are racist.
Am I missing something obvious here?
That seems like a much more reasonable and even-handed approach than just simply saying race should never be mentioned.
Singling out the race question as one that needs to be handled delicately is the wrong way to go, in my opinion.
Think about it from the point of view of someone who doesn't interact with black people very often: they probably can't tell whether a person is a gangbanger or dangerous or not. If you can't distinguish a potentially dangerous black individual, then everyone black person becomes suspect, especially if you have a negative view of the group to begin with. People's natural risk aversion and fear of unfamiliarity just heightens this affect.
But presumably, that same person is more familiar with white people and can distinguish real threats, from, say, their neighbor or the kid down the block.
Your suggestion seems to be predicated on the assumption that reducing the number of reports in general is a good thing, but there's no reason to be making that assumption. Reducing racial profiling is a good thing, but that does not imply that reducing other posts is good.
Given Nextdoor's very localized character, there can be unwritten context to users' posts not always present in other platforms like FB. Eg. very easy to imply "I know where you live" in a way the intended recipient may grasp, but group moderators do not. As another commenter said, having users click through some questions before committing a hot-headed posts seems wise. It would mirror a face-to-face interaction, i.e. "Did you really mean what you said?"
No idea, tho, on the justification for Nextdoor's metrics for reducing abuse.
Did y'all use it before or after purchasing a home? I ran into Nextdoor while searching for ways to research potential homes, but ran into a verification wall that I didn't feel like bypassing. Had I jumped that hurdle it seemed like it may have been a good way to get a feel for potential neighborhoods.
If the UI helps people realize that a black man walking down the street is not suspicious activity and should not be reported as such, then it is doing its job effectively.
The obvious thing you are missing is that "There is a <insert ethnicity> man walking around the neighborhood." without any further identifying characteristics is completely useless information as to "crime and safety" and can lead to both false positives and race-based alarmism.
If you actually see a suspicious person round the neighborhood, helpful information will be to describe how they look in more complete detail, and what is it about their appearance or behavior that causes you to think they are a crime and safety concern.
edit: as I think further on it, I probably find more questionable the whole existence of a feature to report "suspicious activity" than Nextdoor singling race out. I mean, were I to go out in a skirt (I'm a hairy dude) would I be reported for whatever suspicious activity means? If a hippie-ish friend of mine with dreadlocks came over, would that be "suspicious"? The more I think on it the more it seems like a means of fueling people's paranoia/racism. I read that they tried to address that with the crime report feature but I still get the feeling that the whole thing is misplaced.
Nextdoor also seems to give people strange priorities for civic engagement. Winning an argument on Nextdoor doesn't change policy...speaking at Council/School Board meetings does, or better yet, running in an election.
Lots of people on our local Nextdoor seemed frustrated that the Council were voting contrary to some conclusion that was reached on the site. They failed to realize they needed to be making arguments where it mattered - at Council meetings, not online in some private forum.
Nextdoor definitely exposed me to the racist, backwards reality of living among old, wealthy, scared, white people.
The thing that's worse about elections being won by idiots and racists is now you know that most people around you are idiots, racists, or happy to stand next to the racist idiots.
It seems that you have a problem with other people's opinions.
It might be you that has 'the problem' and not they.
'They' have a right to view their community and nation in the terms they see fit, whereas you don't seem to even ascribe them that right, moroever, you take a moral position on the issue.
'Diversity' does not mean different skin tone. It means differing opinions, attitudes and behaviours.
The people who scream 'tolerance' out loud are rarely tolerant.
Unless there is borderline hate speech - then I suggest that conversations between individuals should remain their own - not subject to controls by the government or private corporations.
I've been thinking it would be good to do another round of that with the race test, especially considering how predominately white our workplace is. I don't believe everyone is actively trying to be racist or sexist (though some certainly are), but we might not realize that we're doing that on an unconscious level.
The tests are available here if you'd like to give it a try yourself, doesn't take very long. https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html
See:
http://www.law.virginia.edu/pdf/faculty/reassessingpredictiv...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/239732934_Predictin...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sjop.12288/abstra...
The implicit bias test shows that either this brain-focused definition of racism is wrong, or we need to accept that we are more racist that we would like to admit.
However, having taken one test (just now), I was left with the feeling that these tests may probably not be very accurate for everyone. When I tried it, I did it more from a memory point of view to associate the word and category. I didn't even think about the sequences and any implicit connections. Of course, my result came as "little or no bias", which I do agree with because I have thought about these for a long time and have been contemplating biases (and biased thoughts/decisions) that were not clearly obvious in the past. What I'm not sure of is the applicability of this methodology for all kinds of people.
The test might not be totally fair, though. Is it actually a bias if it is based on facts? Soviet architecture, higher unemployment, high rate of extremism, lower buying power, less people, people moving to the West, the list goes on and on. I think stereotypes and preconceived notions are bad most of the time, but I see no reason to get rid of the ones that are actually true for political correctness.
Now, normally, it would depend on whether the facts that you're citing are true and relevant or not. I don't know enough to judge that.
But secondly, even if the group bias is fair, it's still problematic when you apply it to a specific person. They do not necessarily have to be representative of their group average, and you owe at least giving them a shot to demonstrate that.
Sure, phrased that a bit wrong.
> But secondly, even if the group bias is fair, it's still problematic when you apply it to a specific person.
The test was just about associating cities with words, I do not think you can say anything about persons or specific persons alone from that information.
Meanwhile, my friend's account showed lots of posts like described here. Oh, and the slagging on the homeless was just vile. I have screenshots of several examples but I don't want Nextdoor to go all Erica Barnett on me and ban accounts so I leave them out. But the police department had a lot more "community forums" on the Wallingford part of Nextdoor than the CD's...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/08/26...
----
And also the WP covering a similar problem in Georgetown (a wealthy district in Washington):
* The secret surveillance of ‘suspicious’ blacks in one of the nation’s poshest neighborhoods
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/the-secre...
* The black man arrested in Georgetown because he looked like a shoplifter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/the-black...
* Georgetown social network accused of racial profiling is suspended
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/georgetown-social-netwo...
(Wow. What is the shortest possible Washington Post URL?)
I wish he had gone into more details about what counts as a "racist post." He seems to imply that people were just saying "black dude walking around." But would "black man peering into parked cars" also be flagged? And do those extra barriers, existing solely because of the word "black", lower the reporting rate of those kinds of posts?
I really like Nextdoor, it's one of the few social networks I feel good using.
It will involve other people and potentially the police.
So, when someone does report a person as suspicious solely on account of race, and that leads to, say, a police shooting the person - the person that reported certainly shares part of the guilt.
And doubly so if, due to race-only description, police end up targeting the wrong person.
True. Their direct function (one of) is investigating suspicious instances. Period. If the instance turns out to be just a black man walking by their business, they should say "sorry to bother you, sir" and both continue with their day.
This happened to me several times in various countries - police approached me, asked me some questions, ensured I am neither threat not in need of help and we parted ways amicably. The fact that a black person has smaller chance to such resolution than a white person who looks like me is a problem (both from moral and utilitarian standpoints), but it's not a problem of reporting, it is a problem of whoever taking decision on this resolution.
It's a simple thing - whoever is doing a wrong thing, is to blame for the wrong thing. Since when it became a problem to see things like this?
> when someone does report a person as suspicious solely on account of race
Obviously not the case in this discussion. In fact, I would submit it very rarely if ever happens "solely* on account of race. Even the most crazy, vitriolic, hateful anti-black racist does not report any random black person they meet to the police. They may hate them, they may scowl at them - but even these crazed bigots would know police will need something more. Now, there's no doubt that for many people race is a factor - sometimes a major one - but rarely it is the only one.
In the case under discussion, the person was on other's property, while not invited, behaving in unusual manner (not just passing by). Turns out the unusual manner was of innocent kind, probably complicated by mental issues, but again,
> and that leads to, say, a police shooting the person - the person that reported certainly shares part of the guilt.
Nope. Shooting an innocent person is not a reasonable response to a suspicion complaint. And blaming people for unreasonable and unlawful behavior of others is not right. If reasonable person can and should predict this behavior - i.e. if the police in this place is publicly known to be racist and trigger-happy - then the reporter may have some share of the guilt, but then again the first question that needs to be asked is how come everybody knows the police here is racist and trigger happy and it's still not fixed?
> And doubly so if, due to race-only description, police end up targeting the wrong person.
That did not happen in the case we are discussing - while we assume the person was treated as a threat even if he wasn't, there's no doubt and controversy that it was about the same person and there was no mistaken identity.
While race is not a good qualifier alone (too broad, of course), I don't see how removing it would reduce the chance of the police targeting the wrong person. After all, if the person of concern is of certain race, by pointing out the race you reduce the set of potential mistargeting victims to persons belonging to that race, and if you do not mention it at all, the potential set is all people - which is surely a larger set and thus possibility of mistargeting is larger. You can not reduce the probability of mistargeting by making your targeting selectivity worse.
Of course, you can claim race is not enough for identification - and that's certainly true. The police should be trained to solicit more details.
And yet there are numerous stories involving exactly that. For example, people automatically assume that a black person in a yard of an expensive house is not the owner of that house (and from there, that they're up to no good - and call the police). Seriously, just ask around, and listen to what the affected people have to say. It's not a rare occurrence, and it comes from blacks of all walks of life, economic classes etc - the only common factor is race.
>> Shooting an innocent person is not a reasonable response to a suspicion complaint. And blaming people for unreasonable and unlawful behavior of others is not right.
I never said it's reasonable. And yet, by now, everyone in this country should be well aware that the police is behaving unreasonably in these circumstances - and you cannot ignore that when you ask them to come.
For those people who claim that they don't know - what, they didn't watch the news for the past several years? They have never heard of BLM?
So what I'm supposed to do if I feel unsafe when some stranger comes to my house? I can't call the police. I certainly can't defend myself personally - at least not in many places where personal firearms are either banned or severely restricted, and even showing them would be a crime unless there's already a mortal danger. What I am to do if I'm not in mortal danger yet but also don't want to be very soon?
Your solution seems to be for people to stop calling the police, at least until they have definite proof they are in very serious peril (by then it'd be too late, but at least the police would be able to confirm you were right - maybe postmortem, or maybe they'd be there still in time to take you to the hospital...)
My solution is to demand - right now, without waiting - from the police to introduce sane training in conflict resolution, threat evaluation and non-shoot-first responses, and stop shifting blame to the citizens and demand from them to sacrifice their safety because police can't be trusted to do its job.
What you should do before the police, is ask yourself whether the reason why you consider that stranger suspicious is because they're doing something suspicious - or just because they're black, and you don't expect a black person to be in your neighborhood, say. Just mentally substitute a strange white guy. If it suddenly stops being threatening, then don't call the police. If it doesn't, then go ahead and make that call.
All the other things that you say are orthogonal to that. By all means, do demand that police have sane training in conflict resolution, and are not generally trigger happy - it's a very worthwhile cause. But regardless of how soon you demand that, or how emphatically you do so, it won't happen tomorrow. Until then, you have to be aware of the limitations of the existing system, and interact with it accordingly.
BTW, I generally approve of firearm ownership as well as carrying for self-defense, but same thing applies there, even more so than with police. Though the laws in that regard are far more stringent, and the threat of being charged with brandishing for pulling a gun on an imaginary threat is usually a sufficient deterrent - unlike with cops, where the threat is some paid leave, and worst case, a grand jury that will not indict anyway.
Please, don't be pedantic. Police make mistakes, and have their own biases, to boot. If you call them on some random non-white person in your neighborhood, and disaster ensues, you're partly culpable.
> Police make mistakes, and have their own biases, to boot.
You say it as if it's some kind of excuse. It's funny that for reporter have biases is a culpable offense, but for the police it comes out as a defense instead. It doesn't work this way. In fact, random civilians have full right to be wrong, police are (or supposed to be) trained professionals that are paid to be better than civilians at this. So for them to behave worse than a random civilian should be a firing offense, not an excuse.
> If you call them on some random non-white person in your neighborhood, and disaster ensues, you're partly culpable.
Nope. The police function is to protect people. If they instead hurt innocent people, this is their fault, not somebody's that called on their direct and proper function. Their refusal to perform the function is their fault. Just as if you walk on the street and get mugged, you are not "partly culpable", because you could've walked on other street or stayed home - people who mugged you are fully culpable, because it was their choice to do it.
If you assign blame at the wrong place, they only result would be that people that need to change won't change, and you get more of the same problem. Which we are amply witnessing right now.
Should they be held to a higher standard? Yes. But many aren't, and until that happens, thinking otherwise is wishful or naive. If you call the police, and it spirals out of control, you DO bear some measure of responsibility. Not as much as the actual police, but it's not zero, either, especially if your call is racially motivated.
Mugging isn't a counterexample, because the mugger and the muggee have completely opposite desires in the situation. Nobody calls up a mugger and invites them to their neighborhood. Whereas, when you call the cops, you're somewhat in alignment.
If the additional questions actually do encourage a closer examination of people's thoughts then it might even be effective, at reducing the prevalence of racist opinions rather than only heading off the increase the platform could have been facilitating.
The company decided to define it as descriptions of criminal behavior that don’t have sufficient description, i.e. “dark-skinned man broke into a car” or a detailed description of someone, including race, that fails to describe them doing something sufficiently criminal.
I.e. it is a description that mentions race and lacks either: a) specific criminal behavior or b) other non-race details.
In this case, no wonder that forcing people to provide these details reduces number of such posts - it's practically guaranteed by the very definition!
I also wonder about this:
Nextdoor is aware of “two instances of racial profiling that had slipped through its algorithms in the last few months.”
Nextdoor is a pretty large network. And they have quite a lot of people there, tens if not hundreds of thousands at least. And only two cases of profiling in several months, less then one case per month over whole network? It's either nextdoor users actually are nearly saints in this regard, at least compared to regular population, or they are humblebragging, or the problem itself is really minuscule, or they are blind to it.
Synopsis: http://www.amren.com/the-color-of-crime/
Are my priorities not inline?
Once you've signed up, if you install the app, you can configure push notifications about crimes in progress. You can also get emails for urgent things, if you prefer.
Whether this improves, or diminishes, security and quality of life relative to reading your local newspaper's coverage, is unclear to me. Even when it's not subtly racist or ageist profiling, I've never found the alerts to be actionable.
But the hyperlocal idea is at least an interesting one.
It's a pretty tricky thing.
Should our corporate overlords be making this decision?
Outside of hate speech, which has some legal parameters, this is pretty tough.
Especially if it's people's personal communications.
Some people think that speaking out against 'Black Lives Matter' is racist, while others think that 'Black Lives Matter' is in fact racist.
It's a thin line.
Edit:
I answer my own question pretty quickly but it led to a second thought. I'm curious if the reduction is just people not reporting things because there are more steps now.
"Others actually had their posts scanned for mentions of race (based on a list of hundreds of terms Nextdoor came up with)"
Edit: You edited your post. Your original comment I was replying to said something along the lines of "I wonder if they're just scanning for the word "black" or other races too."