Digging through the bizarre posts on Nextdoor was just a hobby, Jenn Takahashi told VICE News in an interview. She didn't intend for her tweets about the site to become part of a movement to out the site's racism, but that's exactly what happened.
"I had this one neighbor that would complain about someone rearranging her lawn gnome every single day at 4 p.m. on the dot," she remembered. Nonsense like this, she said, "was a reminder for me to not sweat the small stuff."
When she started Best of Nextdoor, a Twitter account and website, it was just meant to highlight funny things.
But the racism on the site has become a source of criticism for users. Casual conversations about garden gnomes turned into posts about "strange Black men" in their neighborhoods. It has been a problem for so long that the former CEO and founder of the site began writing about it in 2015 on the company's blog.
"The vast majority of interactions on Nextdoor are positive, but recently Nextdoor has been at the center of a few press articles, including one in the East Bay Express, about a very difficult issue facing our neighborhoods today: racial profiling," he said.
"We are incredibly saddened that some neighbors have used Nextdoor in this way. Simply stated: we consider profiling of any kind to be unacceptable. Our product is about fostering healthy conversations amongst neighbors. We explicitly prohibit profiling in our Guidelines. Further, if we are notified that a member has violated these guidelines, we will take action and prohibit them from using Nextdoor," he also wrote.
Just four days ago, Nextdoor's new CEO Sarah Friar was forced to release another statement saying, "Racism has no place on Nextdoor."
Takahashi explained that she had to speak out when she saw the company try to claim Black Lives Matter.
"When they posted their statement about Black Lives Matter, I getting DMs from followers saying their posts about Black Lives Matter are being censored. I felt like I had to speak up," said Takahashi. So, she took to Twitter to call out the hypocrisy.
Like Facebook, Nextdoor outsources comment moderation, said VICE. They have moderators or "leads" control the platforms in each neighborhood. They're not trained about the terms of service or informed about any policy changes. Takahashi explained that more often than not they're the first person who signs up to take on the task. She called it akin to a multi-level-marketing scheme.
"That's insane to me," she said.
She's also worked to try and highlight Nextdoor's relationship with the police. She recalled former Clarkston, Georga city council member Andrea Cervone, who was thinking of starting her own parody Twitter account to address housing issues. She's also been combing through the site researching "public participation in cities and the idea of who gets to participate."
While Clarkston is 80 percent nonwhite, the vast majority of Nextdoor users were white homeowners and all of the neighborhood leads were white too.
"And we have had more than a few posts about 'suspicious youth' who are always Black or Brown." Cervone said. When she saw the censoring of Black Lives Matter content, she reached out to Takahashi, and the two "set up the petition, vetted the suggestions, and the outline with several groups that work in the racial equity space," and Takahashi took on the PR.
They're calling for racial bias training for all neighborhood leads as well as other demands.
"If Nextdoor's board and CEO aren't willing to institutionalize training that would actively help their leads make less prejudiced decisions, then all the nice words they have posted about supporting Black Lives Matter are just that––words. And that's no longer enough." Cervone said.
