NYC Gazette

Nextdoor, the world's largest hyperlocal social media network, is used by 13 percent of American adults. Despite its widespread use across approximately 220,000 neighborhoods in the United States, little is known about the demographics and discussions within these communities.

A research team from New York University and the University of Michigan sought to fill this gap by creating a demographic profile of Nextdoor communities. They examined public agency presence and popular discussion topics using U.S. Census data, publicly available information, and posts from a sample of Nextdoor neighborhoods.

The study found that Nextdoor neighborhoods are more likely to be located in less dense, Whiter, wealthier, older, and more educated communities. Public agencies, particularly law enforcement agencies, are more likely to be present in communities with higher proportions of non-White residents, greater income inequality, higher average home values, and higher incomes.

"Research on social media tends to focus on national and international political discussions happening on large platforms," says Zeve Sanderson, founding executive director of NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP) and co-lead author of the paper published in the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media. "But this limits our understanding of the digital media ecosystem as a whole."

One unique feature of Nextdoor is that public agencies can join through the Nextdoor for Public Agencies program. However, the presence of law enforcement agencies has drawn criticism for contributing to community policing and surveillance with racialized impacts.

"We don’t know why law enforcement agencies are more likely to be present in Nextdoor neighborhoods with more non-White residents," notes CSMaP Graduate Research Affiliate Megan A. Brown. "They could be there to better engage with the community or facilitate surveillance by community members."

The researchers also analyzed what these communities discussed using a sample from 30 Nextdoor neighborhoods. They collected nearly 116,000 posts and approximately 164,000 comments but did not include direct messages or private group posts.

Posts seeking or offering services were most frequent but posts reporting potentially suspicious people or activities received the highest engagement despite being less frequent.

"Information sharing is an important indicator of social capital formation," Sanderson concludes. "However, while Nextdoor has made changes designed to combat racial profiling and surveillance on the platform discussions on suspicious persons could still prompt biased behavior by law enforcement."

Other authors included Sarah Graham from CSMaP; Minjoo Kim from NYU; Solomon Messing from NYU; and Joshua A. Tucker from NYU.

Data was collected after obtaining consent from individuals living at those addresses with personally identifiable information separated to preserve privacy.

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