Nextdoor.com’s Response to FAC Letter

Below is a cut and paste of the email sent in reply to our letter to Nextdoor.com. The Florida Action Committee (FAC) had reached out to social media site Nextdoor.com about their policy of not only excluding persons required to register as sex offenders, but prevented anyone who resides with one from joining their site.

We will afford them a couple more months before determining whether to file suit.

Gail,

Your letter to Nirav was forwarded to me. Thank you for the thoughtful message. We appreciate public minded citizens whose goals are to make our justice system more fair for everyone.

As for Nextdoor’s policies with regard to registered offenders, I wanted to give you some background on two important differences between Nextdoor and other social networks that affect these policies:

1. Unlike Facebook, on Nextdoor you cannot control who sees your posts. While on Facebook you can choose who has access to what messages, on Nextdoor every member who lives in your area can see every post you make.
2. Nextdoor has a real name policy (as does Facebook). However unlike Facebook (and every other social network I’m aware of), Nextdoor also requires members to verify their address and that address is shared with our members’ neighbors.

These two differences mean that Nextdoor has to be significantly more conscious of our members’ safety than other social networks.

Three additional challenges to note:

1. While we understand that people end up on sex offender registries for a wide range of reasons and that not everyone on the registry is a threat to their neighbors, we work with more than 170,000 neighborhoods across the country and have no way of reliably determining which people on the registry are a potential threat and which are not.
2. We have the added challenge that the success of Nextdoor in a community depends on our members feeling comfortable sharing personal information (both required information like their real names and addresses, as well as optional profile information–including the names and ages of their kids) with their neighbors. So if members decide they no longer feel safe sharing this information on Nextdoor, even if this belief is misguided, Nextdoor can no longer be successful in that community.
3. Nextdoor works with with thousands of police departments and public agencies, whose willingness to work with us and to recommend Nextdoor to their constituents depends in part on our commitment to keeping our members safe. So we have to be conscious of setting policies that these partners are comfortable with. And when I asked our Agency Team the question you asked us (which partner agencies feel strongly about this policy), they responded that they wouldn’t be able to single out specific ones because they are asked about this policy in every single meeting they have with potential agency partners.

All that being said, we appreciate the points you are making and our team is going to review the policy to evaluate if there are ways that we can make changes to make our service more inclusive despite the challenges listed above.

Thank you again for your thoughtful letter.

• Gordon Strause

Nextdoor / Director of Community