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HOW NEXTDOOR ADDRESSED RACIAL PROFILING ON ITS PLATFORM
by Phil Simon
On March 3, 2015, hyperlocal social network Nextdoor announced that it had raised $110 million in venture capital. The deal valued the company at more than $1 billion—revered, unicorn status. It had to be a giddy moment for CEO Nirav Tolia and cofounders David Wiesen, Prakash Janakiraman, and Sarah Leary. But just three weeks later, all of that celebrating must have seemed like a distant memory.
The news site Fusion ran an article explaining how Nextdoor “is becoming a home for racial profiling.”1 Reporter Pendarvis Harshaw detailed how presumably white members were using Nextdoor’s crime and safety forum to report “suspicious” activities by African Americans and Latinos. ...
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