Is Misinformation on Nextdoor Impacting Local Politics?

Was Nextdoor's impact on the world exemplified by a crucial funding referendum for the Christina School District of Newark, Delaware? Medium's tech site OneZero reports: As the 2019 referendum approached, I saw Nextdoor posts claiming that the district was squandering money, that its administrators were corrupt, and that it already spent more money per student than certain other districts with higher test scores. The last of those was true — but left out the context that Christina hosts both the state's school for the deaf and its largest autism program. District advocates told me later that they had wanted to post counterarguments to the platform, but were hindered by Nextdoor's decentralized structure. Some district officers, for instance, couldn't even access the posts and discussions happening in the city of Newark, because they were only visible to other Newark residents, and they lived outside the city's borders. (The district's headquarters are actually in nearby Wilmington.) After the referendum failed, some pointed to misinformation on Nextdoor as a factor in its defeat.... A month after the failed Christina School District referendum in 2019 the school board voted 4-3 to eliminate 63 jobs, with the alternative being bankruptcy and a bid for a state bailout. Some parents gave up hope; a neighbor of mine who had been among the district's staunch supporters abruptly sold her house and moved her family to suburban Pennsylvania, where public schools are better-funded. Others who could afford it moved their children to private schools, furthering one of the trends that had put the district in tough shape to begin with. The district and its backers started planning another referendum campaign for 2020, with the stakes now desperate... This time, their strategy included arming supporters with facts and counter-arguments to post whenever they encountered criticism on their respective Nextdoor networks around the district... On election day, June 9, polling places had lines out the door — a rarity for a single-issue local election. Turnout was unprecedented, nearly doubling that of 2019. And the result was a landslide: Some 70% of voters approved all four funding requests, with more people voting "yes" than the total number who had voted the year before. Suddenly, the district's future looked hopeful again. Exactly what role Nextdoor played in that dramatic turnaround is hard to disentangle. The option to vote by mail due to Covid-19 may have helped; the sense of urgency for the district certainly did. Claire O'Neal [a parent who won appointment to the school board later that year], believes the informal Nextdoor information campaign made a difference. "I do think it was a factor in its passing," she told me. The lesson for the district, and other public agencies, she believes, is that they can no longer win the battle of public opinion on their own. They have to actively enlist advocates in the community to wage it on their behalf on Nextdoor and other hyperlocal online networks. "It just requires more of individual citizens," the schoolboard member added. "It's a lot more work because there's just so much information out there, and it's up to you to decide what's right and what's wrong. "There's a part of that that's beautiful, and there's a part of that that's really scary."

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