Nextdoor wants people to act nicer. Should the news follow?
Last week I started to lay out a case for increasing the social utility of news. I’d like to quickly and concisely recap what it might take to more systematically increase this social utility.
We would first need to design alternatives to these dominant tendencies within most news organizations:
Individual focus: News is an individual product designed for people to consume largely by themselves. Unfortunately, news is also designed to capture and keep attention. Enter the doom scroll. There are plenty of studies showing news is dialing up the volume and emotional tenor of content. These trends are causing overwhelm and feelings of a lack of efficacy for people who still read the news, not places of strength when trying to approach complex social problems, where feelings of collective efficacy are often a prerequisite.
Low utility of informing: The money needed to run a high-quality newsroom is increasingly tough to find. At the same time, the fractional cost for any individual to put information out to the public, sometimes even a large proportion of the public, is almost nothing. People with large social media or YouTube followings can pass along information about current events faster than newsrooms. The information isn’t always accurate, of course, but it is fast and can be repeated equally as fast. This dynamic is at least a decade old. Still, most newsrooms have yet to reallocate resources away from trying to meet this informing role and toward providing a more unique and lasting value that better capitalizes on the unique skill sets and training present within a newsroom.
And we will need to overcome at least these three challenges:
Reach and market penetration: Fewer people consume high-quality news, and those who do are consuming less of it (thanks to Sam Cholke for this study!). News will have to help individuals use information in ways that increase social utility without having the benefit of large audiences. It is unlikely that news can use social media to spread information with high social utility, as those platforms have incentives to drive engagement in ways that are socially destructive.
Independence: There’s no question people are likely to be able to use information to productively address challenges in their communities. The question is who provides this information and how independent that source is. Whether a news organization can be that source is not clear. News organizations would need to navigate facilitating collective action without favoring a particular outcome.
News organizations have also shown resistance to supplanting their own judgment of newsworthiness with community needs or priorities.
Lack of ethical clarity: journalism tolerates an incredible amount of difference in the training, approach, ideology, and technique of its practitioners. Reporters don’t have to pass the equivalent of a bar exam before they step into the newsroom, nor do editors recite in unison a version of the (nonbinding!) Hippocratic oath as ethical northstar. There’s massive upside to a low barrier to entry in news; no prohibition on working alongside and with people from our communities in producing the news. A downside, however, is that establishing a detailed ethical framework and theory of change is left to each news organization or independent reporter to puzzle through. Not surprisingly, it’s a grab bag and a bit of a mess.
We are likely to need to have more articulated values and ethics for news designed for social utility, especially because it is likely to diverge in meaningful ways from existing news products. For now, I think it is enough to expect that for news to have social utility, it must be in service of a multiracial democracy. News can and should be a public good serving an expansive view of the public.
A thought experiment…
To make these framework ideas more concrete, let’s think about what a product with social utility might look like. Social network B-team member Nextdoor recently rolled out a feature meant to have social utility.
A few weeks ago I saw a story on Nextdoor from the Detroit CBS news affiliate. It was standard crime news about a nearby armed robbery and shooting and light on the details. After this story and before the start of the comments, Nextdoor posted an AI-generated question it calls a “conversation starter.” The AI asked, “What community resources can be implemented in Hamtramck to help prevent violent crimes like the recent attempted robbery and shooting on Grayling Street?”
Productive discussion did not ensue. Only 5 people commented, and none of them lived in the city where the crime is said to have happened. The initial comment was a cynical joke. The comment under the joke was a tangentially related missive about trust in institutions. Somebody responded to that idea dismissively, and the last commenter said a root cause of crime is a lack of parental involvement in schools.
These AI provocations appear to be falling flat. I saw several others that followed a similar pattern to that above. Commenters weren’t given much to work with, though. All the conversation starters I saw were attached to perfunctory stories on sensational or tragic events and light on details and context. Could this kind of provocation work when readers are given more to grapple with or where that grappling is more directed?
It turns out that these AI provocations are part of Nextdoor’s new strategy to explicitly increase their utility by increasing civility on their site. I doubt any profit-driven company can consistently put social utility above other interests, but I am eager to see these experiments continue to unfold.
The company is trying another new AI-powered civility prompt before a user posts an uncharitable comment. Having read about this, I tried replying to an ancient post from a friend of mine with this comment, “I hate this idea and think you’re stupid.” Thankfully, the comment did not post, and I was instead delivered a popup saying, “Kindness Reminder. Your reply looks similar to content that’s been flagged for violating guidelines. Do you want to rephrase it?”
The kindness reminder language is infantilizing, but the idea is interesting. Could there be potential to push people toward critical thinking and productive dialogue by offering an opportunity for people to challenge their thinking, with help, but in private rather than in a public-facing comment section?
Chaplains, therapists, and even palliative care professions have long used a technique called “non-directive” listening that seems well suited for those of us working in news. This kind of question-and-answer situation is not an interview but a conversation geared toward helping one party achieve clarity through the other party asking questions, staying nonjudgmental, and refraining from offering a solution.
As I understand it, if I asked a chaplain a tough question like, “What is the point of life?” I might get a similar question offered back to me, like, “What are your current thoughts about the meaning of life?”
For those of you more familiar with this kind of approach in real life, do you think a chatbot or AI-assisted text message product could help people clarify their thoughts on community issues and needs? If a service-driven newsroom were a partner here, would it be helpful for people to be able to ask a reporter to jump in when somebody wants to fact-check something or has a question they really need a human to be able to answer? Could a system like this be directed at helping people think through things before offering their ideas in a public setting like a community meeting?
What do you think of Nextdoor’s attempts at increasing civility? How might a public service-driven newsroom iterate on these ideas to create productive dialogue? Would that be a good use of newsroom time and resources?
A word of caution even for this very hypothetical product. The way people ask questions to AI assistants can already be so biased that the answers AI then provides may just reinforce the original ideas rather than providing people more to think about.
If you know of other experiments like these, please let me know. I have one reading recommendation for you, and then I will see you next week.
What I’m reading
Last fall I started a reading list post and fell behind on updating it almost immediately. So now I’ll mention books, studies, or pieces I’ve found helpful here at the end of the blog. Once a month, I’ll carry those posts over to the reading list so that apart from the books read and lost to time during the spring and summer, it will be up to date.
The Kingdom the Power and the Glory: American Evangelicals in a Time of Extremism by Tim Alberta, 2023:
Alberta covered politics for years and is now a writer for The Atlantic. The son of an evangelical pastor, he grew up around the same time as I did and not far from my rural Michigan town. I had proximity to WWJD bracelets and promise rings back then, but little knowledge of the evangelical movement. Alberta is a guide through the politics and history of this movement and its current political and cultural power.
Alberta’s thesis is that many evangelicals have intertwined faith in their god with a belief that the United States can and must be an explicitly evangelical Christian nation. It is a book about values, politics, and power. Alberta is a great storyteller whose style is both charitable and rigorous. He is transparent about his faith, and the reporting is an incredible example of journalism that is enhanced by directly relevant personal experience.
I picked up the book at my local library the day before Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in public on a Utah college campus. It is impossible for me not to try to process that event through Alberta’s lens. I have found it helpful and a far cry from the speculative and sensational coverage still dominating the news. I am reading the book and meditating on the importance of values and leaders being expansive enough to embrace difference.
