One hot Wednesday morning in July, Bekky, a teacher from Horley in Surrey, put her two-year-old daughter into the back of her car and began the usual drive to work. “Then out of nowhere,” Bekky says, “this cat just banged into the side of my car.” She only knew the impact was a cat when she stopped and saw the animal in her wing mirror, staggering around on the asphalt.
Worries tumbled through her mind. First, for the cat, which she thought had gone under the rear wheels. Then for its owner, and the slim chance of finding them in a hurry. She also worried that she could be held responsible for the cat’s injuries. A group of people watched from a bus stop down the road, until a bus arrived and took them away.
Bekky found the cat under a bush, hurt but alive. “I didn’t want to leave it in that heat, but I had my daughter in the car, and no way of getting it.” In the end, Bekky was able to find the cat’s owner, a young woman who lived in a house nearby, who took it to a vet. Bekky spent an anxious day at work until news came that the cat would be OK. “I was a bit of a wreck,” she says. But that wasn’t the only news. “Someone from work sent me a WhatsApp message saying: ‘Is this you?’”
Looking at the link, she saw a public post from the local Facebook page. It was addressed to “The lady driver of a black/dark grey Fiesta who struck a black cat”. “It was a gentleman who’d been at the bus stop,” Bekky says. “He was trying to reassure me that there was no way I could have stopped the car, because he’d seen the cat dart straight out.” Bekky joined the group, relieved, and replied that all was well, in order to prevent other cat-owners from worrying. Moments later, a stranger replied: “Wow Bekky, I wish you’d run over my cat!” After that, the praise and tributes continued for nearly a week. “I was like a celebrity,” she says. “I felt amazing.”
But Bekky soon saw another side of her local group after the cat adventure faded from memory. Many posts were complaints, often about crime, and regularly naming one troublemaker in particular. “There was even a post where someone had taken pictures of a car in a driveway where they’d seen people having sex. It really is a Jeremy Kyle sort of page. It made me think that everybody’s watching.”
Nick Lisher runs the site Nextdoor in the UK, which took over streetlife.co.uk in 2017. Nextdoor is an US social media firm with operations in 10 other countries. It provides a platform very similar to Facebook, but instead of connecting friends, it connects neighbours, who may not know each other at all and share only a neighbourhood. In Lisher’s experience, ordinary motives bring people to Nextdoor first. “We don’t have better machines to help you find a plumber than Google does,” he says, “but sometimes a neighbour is better than an algorithm.” Although the company doesn’t release user numbers, the Nextdoor neighbourhoods so far created apparently cover 90% of the UK. In a few places more than 60% of the households are said to be subscribers, but from our straw poll of readers it seems that muddling through on Facebook or WhatsApp is much more widespread.
Stories such as Bekky’s were almost impossible a decade ago, when social media had not yet linked strangers into local groups. Now, they happen every day, bad stories as well as good. This week in Perth, Australia, a vegan woman, Cilla Carden, was unsuccessful in taking legal action against her neighbours, who she claimed were deliberately barbecuing meat and fish in order to upset her with the smell. In response, someone created a Facebook event and 4,600 people said they were planning a ceremonial barbecue outside Carden’s house before the page was taken offline. Only social media makes it possible to bully on such a scale.
When we asked readers to tell us how local social media had changed their neighbourhoods, we were flooded with responses. “I now know every single neighbour on my close on a first-name basis,” says Baljinder, 34, from Birmingham, who started an online neighbourhood watch group for her street of 27 families. She says that it is all very good-natured “apart from crap jokes in the WhatsApp group”.
“The community will share food, residents offer furniture, we even had a mini-Olympics where we blocked off the street,” says Nicky, 41, about the Facebook group for her cul-de-sac. “All neighbours should do this for their streets.”
People often get into local social media for practical reasons, but that is rarely where it ends. Raghaventra lives in an apartment block in Chennai, India, where he and others coordinate on WhatsApp to save water. “The WhatsApp group played a vital role in getting to know about my neighbours,” he says. At Kate’s block in Montreal, Canada, “people exchange clothing and toys outgrown by their kids, ask for recommendations for handymen or babysitters”, she says. “We know each other better and conversations flow easily when we meet during our daily life.”
As a young person living in rural Northumberland, Harvey finds his local Facebook groups a lifeline when it comes to finding things to do. “It’s one of the main factors as to why I want to stay in the village and raise a family here,” he says. Chris in London says: “To be able to live freely and normally and also communicate with my fellow gay neighbours, it is beyond my wildest dreams. I couldn’t have managed to do that without technology and social media and it makes me happy, finally!”
People don’t often talk about social media this way. Most public discussion seems to centre on whether it invades our privacy (it probably does) or harms our minds (it probably doesn’t), leaving little room for positivity, which is strange considering how much people seem to love using it. When the May government launched its loneliness strategy last October, the big idea was for GPs in England to start issuing “social prescriptions” for art clubs and walking groups, in the hope that they would help people build connections with their neighbours. Another plan was for the then ministers Tracey Crouch and Margot James to meet the big tech companies and “explore the impact technology has on loneliness and how they can help prevent it”. That’s “prevent”, you’ll notice, as if the impact must be bad.
Local social media is often not anonymous, which prevents some of the abuses found on Twitter. At the same time, it feels like a more serious step to exclude someone from their neighbourhood group than ordinary social media. Nextdoor relies on a system of “lead” users to report problematic posts, which it then decides either to retain or remove. Lisher describes three basic rules to cover people’s conduct: “Be helpful, not hurtful”, “Don’t use Nextdoor as a soapbox” and “Promote business the right way”. It sounds simple, but Nextdoor’s moderation team is the biggest in the company.
When Sian and her partner moved into their east London flat in March, they joined the Facebook group that had been set up to cover their block and three others nearby. They soon regretted it. Sian says a few people dominated the group with complaints about loitering teenagers, misuse of the lift and other minor matters. But the main problem was the bins, which the council stopped collecting, claiming that residents were leaving rubbish on the floor. The bin room grew fuller and smellier and the problem became a hot topic on the group, where many voices blamed other neighbours for being messy. One day, a post announced that a letter with a resident’s name and address on it had been found among some rubbish on the floor. They included a picture, adding, as Sian remembers it: “This is the person who is leaving their rubbish everywhere. They should be ashamed.”
Sian was shocked, and said they should have approached the man privately before posting his name and address to the group, where he couldn’t defend himself because he hadn’t joined. “Do you want people knocking on his door?” she said. Sian remembers about four or five regular posters replying to say: “Well, why don’t you do something about it then, because you never do anything.”
Perhaps the saddest thing about Sian’s case is that she and her neighbours were trying to be a community, but instead of bringing them together, Facebook pushed them apart. Six months after moving in, Sian feels that the group has permanently damaged her relationship with her fellow residents. “I wouldn’t say I know my neighbours,” she says. “All I know is what their pet peeves are. I’m sure if we bumped into each other in the hallway and we didn’t have this group, we could have a friendly conversation. But now, because of the group, I just want to avoid that.”
Nor is her experience unusual. Deen from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, says that his neighbours, with the help of a new app, “are naming and shaming anything they don’t like about others”. Sometimes they add photographs and videos, he says.
“People don’t seem to realise that social media defamation remains defamation,” says Kate, about her group in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Disagreements are not likely to vanish from anybody’s neighbourhood. Nor is social media, but neighbours could certainly learn to use it better. Lisher suspects that people are often surprised by the different atmosphere that exists in local groups, compared with the bespoke list of friends and celebrities that they follow on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. “It’s not an echo chamber,” he says. “Suddenly you find that your neighbours voted differently than you in the EU referendum … It’s different in terms of the rules of engagement.”
In truth, social media may or may not make us more neighbourly. But it does show us more clearly who we always were.
Some names have been changed
