In a rare bit of good news, a technology company has managed to cut the number of racist posts on their platform by 75%. Their secret? Empathy. (And also months of hard work, lots of prototyping and getting expert input.)
Nextdoor is a private social network for neighborhoods, where people talk about local stuff, like lost pets and the quest for a reliable contractor. And since good neighbors keep an eye on things, they often report criminal or suspicious activity in their “Crime and Safety” forums. That otherwise unique benefit was being spoiled, as revealed in a story last year on Fusion, by a growing number of posts that were based on racial profiling, like neighbors peering from windows and identifying “sketchy characters” who were actually somebody’s black or brown guest.
Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia was shocked by the story. “I hadn’t seen it in my own neighborhood’s Nextdoor,” he says. But he and his team took it seriously. “These posts were less than 1% of 1% of all our posts,” he says, though that could certainly have changed. “We made the decision that the damage that could be done by any of these posts was just too much, and we couldn’t dismiss it.” Besides, he says, “We knew these posts were not who we wanted to be as a company.”
They also had to navigate the dicey territory of asking someone, who was already nervous about something, to consider their behavior without shaming them or implying that they are racist.
That’s where empathy played a key role. They relied on the research of Stanford professor Jennifer Eberhardt, who studies bias in the criminal justice system. And the team tapped experts like the Oakland Police Department and Neighbors for Racial Justice for language on bringing up race effectively.
And then they used technology to frame a polite conversation with a user who thought something bad might be happening. “We tried to create decision points,” Tolia says, “to get people to stop and think as they’re observing people, to cut down on implicit bias.”
Eventually the team came up with a series of tips that gently prompt users to think more deeply about what actually is suspicious activity. Ask yourself: Is what I saw actually suspicious, especially if I take race or ethnicity out of the equation?
These tips helped preserve the dignity of the poster. “You don’t accuse, you try to defuse, and approach people before they’ve made the decision to profile,” says Tolia.
After many iterations, they were able to reduce racial profiling by 75% in test markets. They’ve now rolled out the new interface to all 110,000 neighborhoods they serve.
Fusion has an excellent follow-up story that details how the company tested various solutions.
But when you consider how segregated American neighborhoods tend to be, it’s not surprising that profiling became an issue. We tend to know people who only look like us. And that means that profiling behavior becomes an effortless part of everything we do.
I asked Tolia for his best advice for other leaders facing their version of a race-based issue (cc: Airbnb) which I’ve boiled down to a four step process: Name the problem, even if it’s uncomfortable; create a hypothesis to test solutions; tap diverse experts for help; and get serious about testing and iteration.
But at the core is empathy, for everyone involved. Tolia grew up in Odessa, Texas, the first generation American son of Indian immigrants. “To my parents, I was an American,” he says. “Outside my house, I was Indian.” That cognitive dissonance of being a threatening ‘other’ was not lost on him—or his diverse founding team—when they made the issue a priority
“As embedded and nasty as racism can be, it can be overcome,” says Tolia. But there is no magic bullet. “It will take a thousand initiatives, from lots of places,” he says. “We want to be putting points on the board as just one.”
On Point
| Twitter hires African American ad veteran to run their in-house creative team |
| Jayanta Jenkins, most recently the global creative director for advertising at Apple/Beats by Dre, has been named Twitter’s new global group creative director, the company’s highest-ranking creative position. He’ll oversee Twitter’s in-house creative team, and will report to VP-Global Brand Strategy Joel Lunenfeld. The veteran ad man has his work cut out for him: Twitter is increasingly looking to deploy creative marketing strategies to explain what the company is all about and how to use it. Ad Age has his greatest hits. |
| Ad Age |
| Racist neighbors are responsible for a lack of health care coverage |
| Paul Krugman has published a pointed op-ed linking the recent and staggering surge in mortality for pregnant women in Texas, with the gaps in state by state support for Medicaid, among other programs. “It’s about race. Medicaid expansion disproportionately benefits nonwhite Americans,” he writes. “And opposition to these programs is concentrated in states where voters in local elections don’t like the idea of helping neighbors who don’t look like them.” |
| New York Times |
| Why white families leave, the Asian edition |
| Essayist Anjali Enjeti explores the delicate subject of liberal white flight from a lovely suburb outside of Atlanta, Ga, but from a surprising angle: People are leaving because they are afraid the number of high-performing Asian students in the school district will disproportionately impact their white children. There is significant precedence for this in the U.S. “Asians are only 'model minorities' when they are small in number with minimal influence on a community,” she writes. |
| Pacific Standard |
| Black women teachers are paid less than their white counterparts |
| All teachers, particularly those who work in early childhood education, are woefully underpaid. But a new report from the Center for American Progress shows that black women significantly lag behind their white counterparts. On average, African American female teachers working full time make 84 cents for every $1 earned by their white counterparts. |
| American Progress |
The Woke Leader
| How not to write about people who don’t look like you |
| PhD student Brandon Taylor deepens the conversation about empathy by tackling the harms that are caused when people write about people who don’t look like themselves. Though he focuses on the literary sphere, the advice is applicable to marketers, communications pros and anyone who posts anything, anywhere. “Harmful writing happens when an author’s empathy becomes limited in scope,” he writes. Expand your mind. |
| LitHub |
| The history of state sanctioned genocide in California |
| History is a tough beast. And when it comes to stories that don’t square with the nobility of the American spirit, a particularly rough ride. But a new, and particularly gruesome book by Benjamin Madley, documents the systemic slaughter of the peaceful indigenous peoples of California that occurred between 1846-1873, saying it was not all that different from what happened to the Jews, Armenians or Rwandans. |
| Newsweek |
| Growing old in Little India |
| As parents become elders in India, they expect to be taken care of by relatives living close by. But for many people growing older in "Little India" neighborhoods across the U.S., that hasn't been an option. In a charming and surprising story, Ozy’s Sanjena Sathian explores the new world of India-themed retirement communities, that mimic, in extraordinary ways, the best possible versions of life back at home. |
| Ozy |
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