Facebook is launching a new section of its app that is designed to connect neighbors and update news at the neighborhood level.
The new feature, probably known as Neighborhoods, is now available in Canada and will be launched soon for users in the United States to test. As we mentioned earlier, Neighborhoods have been technically available since at least October last year, but this limited test only employs Calgary residents in Canada.
Nearby, Facebook users can create a separate sub-profile and populate it with interest and a custom bio. You can join your own lower-case neighborhood and the surrounding area, and nowadays you can complain about the next door to the porch pirates, kids, or whatever else you want to do. Aware of Nextdoor acute restraint headaches, Facebook says it will have a set of organizations dedicated to Neighborhoods to review comments and posts to keep it “relevant and kind”.
In the surrounding area, frustrated users can continue the conversation and strike out and do some light work, it seems. Facebook new corner blocking feature will also come. OK as far as privacy goes, it’s Facebook. Neighbors are not its own standalone app and will naturally share your Neighbor’s behavior to serve your targeted ads elsewhere. Like Like Nextdoor, Neighborhoods are a group of geographically defined user groups located in a single place to discuss local integration. Users can also create specific splinter groups for their interests.
“You can find vibrant local Facebook groups about your region, or you can create your own Neighborhood-Border group based on your interests,” Facebook said in a blog post. “You can create a neighborhood group for local bird watchers, or discuss last night’s game with fellow basketball lovers in your area.” It is fairly certain that at least some of the activities of these groups will be transformed into smaller squabbles, horrific political arguments and even direct racism, as we have seen in the next door. Facebook has a great horrible track record when it lets users group out.
Facebook groups, which allow users to organize around lucky interests, have been branded as hot-beds of uncontrolled extremism, nurturing everything from white supremacy to anti-vaccine misinformation to conspiracy theories. It’s not at all clear how Facebook is going to avoid the same problems in its new neighborhood.
