The CEO of Nextdoor, the neighborhood social media app, vowed to ramp up the nationwide company’s racial-equity efforts following rumblings of a boycott over local moderators’ censorship of posts on Black Lives Matter protests, NPR reports. Sarah Friar said the company’s rules were too ambiguous and it didn’t move quickly enough to protect such posts from deletion on the grounds that they were too political and general for the hyperlocal service. Those guidelines for the volunteer moderators have now been updated. “Black Lives Matter is a local topic,” Friar said.
Nextdoor, which serves as a community bulletin board in more than 265,000 neighborhoods, has long battled complaints over hosting racist comments. Friar said Nextdoor will offer race-bias training to all moderators, recruit more Black moderators, and work to more effectively screen out racial profiling comments. Nextdoor already had announced it was ending its “forward to police” feature. The Minneapolis-based group Neighbors for More Neighbors, which helped organize the petition, applauded the news but remained cautious. “This is a positive step towards creating a true community forum where all people in our neighborhoods feel safe to participate,” said activist Andrea Cervone with the group. Critics of Nextdoor, including U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have drawn attention to the app’s so-called Karen problem. It’s a term that has come to describe a middle-aged, privileged white woman whose racist views cause her to overreact to misperceived threats.