Across the Web and Down the Street

So much has been said about social media and the Internet's ability to bring people together across incredible distance -- we can wish a friend happy birthday in Belize, fire off an email to a colleague in London and then take a turn in a game of Words With Friends with your sister in California, all from the comfort of your New York home. But what happens when your social network is centered around being around the corner and down the street? NextDoor is a social networking site centered around neighborhoods, allowing communities to connect and communicate online instead of through the time-honored method of stapling a flier to a telephone pole. As you might expect, people use it in a variety of ways -- advertising their local plowing or dog-walking businesses, selling unwanted items, sharing photos of lost pets and found mementos, complaining about the person who doesn't clean up after their dog, and asking for local recommendations. During the pandemic, however, use of the site ramped up, both for better and for worse. CNN ran an article on March 18th, 2020 by Samantha Murphy Kelly, right as the United States was locking down, about how rapidly usage on the site was changing in light of the pandemic. Some users saw the site as an opportunity to make a quick buck or trade high-demand goods for their own needs. Hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and cleaning supplies like Lysol wipes were difficult to obtain (and though we may not have realized this on March 18th, but would be nearly impossible to get for weeks and even months after this article's publication.) Selling these sought-after goods to your neighbors is an ethically dicey situation, particularly when combined with rocketing prices for the most in-demand items, but many newfound entrepreneurs used the site to profit from pandemic fears and shortages.

On the reverse of this, however, were people using the site to help out their fellow neighbors. Unlike Facebook, in which your social circle may live all over the world and are often people you already know, such as friends and family, NextDoor consists of people in your neighborhood who you may not know at all (or only know as "the person down the street who really needs to get their truck's muffler fixed.") Some people, seeing the unrest and fear swirling through their streets as the country began to understand the seriousness of what we were dealing with, used NextDoor as a way to check in on their neighbors and their community. Some reached out with offers to grocery shop, pick up medicine or run important errands for elderly people, immunocompromised people, those who were quarantined from exposure or a positive test result.

Even for users who limited their interactions strictly to online-only, the pandemic brought about a big increase in a behavior long-present in both online and in-person social behavior: the spread of misinformation. While conversations about how misinformation spreads through online communities and social networks are not new, well-known platforms with global audiences, such as Twitter and Facebook, often have at least some form of method for identifying and annotating or removing such misinformation to prevent its spread. Additionally, these user pools may contain people knowledgeable in the fields of the alleged information who may choose to dispute or discredit these posts in their comment sections or by posting to their connections in an attempt to mitigate the harm of the misinformation. On NextDoor, however, the communities tend to be smaller, as they are made up of people in a neighborhood. While a post on Facebook about a supposed COVID cure might go viral and have a nationally known and trusted medical professional respond to debunk it, that is a lot less likely on NextDoor -- unless you live down the street from a celebrity doctor.

NextDoor may make the internet feel a lot more local, but the COVID pandemic has highlighted some of the holes in the plan. This site can bring people together and encourage neighbors to help each other, but it also is a place where scams, schemes and misinformation can spread.