Selling Fear? There's An App For That

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the BE-A-PART-OF-PRISON-PIPELINE! dept

Fear sells.

Fear has always sold. It has sold wars to the public, both real and imagined. It has propelled the endless funding of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. It has sold the killing of unarmed citizens by police officers to courts. It has sold the diminishment of our Constitutional rights, most notably at our borders. It has sold surveillance creep — the steady encroachment of cameras in public areas, increasingly coupled with tech that makes anonymity a historical relic.

It has sold newspapers and brought eyeballs to newscasts. As the public has shifted its news consumption to the web, the fear salesmen have followed, ensuring what bleeds still leads, even online.

The public still buys it, even when the facts don’t back up the narrative. A decade of historically low crime levels has made little dent in the public perception that we live in a country overrun by drug cartels, sex traffickers, and assorted lowlifes hellbent on separating us from our possessions and lives.

All of this information is a Google search away, but it’s ignored in favor of what still brings viewers to websites and funding to government agencies. This would all be sad enough if it weren’t for a new wave of tech companies behaving like newspapers riding the fine line between information and sensationalism.

Rani Molla’s report for Vox about the rise of snitch apps and the use of “neighborhood” platforms to encourage racial stereotyping under the guise of “safety” is a depressing read. But it’s a worth a read nonetheless. People apparently love to be afraid, and there’s a long list of tech companies willing to indulge this urge.

Violent crime in the US is at its lowest rate in decades. But you wouldn’t know that from a crop of increasingly popular social media apps that are forming around crime.

Apps like Nextdoor, Citizen, and Amazon Ring’s Neighbors — all of which allow users to view local crime in real time and discuss it with people nearby — are some of the most downloaded social and news apps in the US, according to rankings from the App Store and Google Play.

This is just part of it. But it’s an unhealthy start. Citizen, for instance, used to do business as “Vigilante,” so that gives you some idea of the mindset some of these apps/tech appeal to. Amazon is upping the ante further than the rest, though. It’s turning its doorbell cameras into reality TV for crime junkies.

It recently advertised an editorial position that would coordinate news coverage on crime, specifically based around its Ring video doorbell and Neighbors, its attendant social media app. Neighbors alerts users to local crime news from “unconfirmed sources” and is full of Amazon Ring videos of people stealing Amazon packages and “suspicious” brown people on porches. “Neighbors is more than an app, it’s the power of your community coming together to keep you safe and informed,” it boasts.

Apps like these turn isolated incidents that don’t even amount to a rounding error in local crime stats into a narrative that users’ neighborhoods are full of suspicious people doing suspicious things. This kickstarts a vicious circle where cops are called on “suspicious brown people,” leading to increased profiling of brown people… which leads to arrest stats that seem to prove brown people are more dangerous. And Amazon is there to get this ball rolling by hiring an editorial team to drum up fear using doorbell camera footage. What a time to be alive.

The tech revolution has made bigotry more efficient.

A recent Motherboard article found that the majority of people posted as “suspicious” on Neighbors in a gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood were people of color.

Nextdoor has been plagued by this sort of stereotyping.

Citizen is full of comments speculating on the race of people in 9-1-1 alerts.

To be fair, these apps and tech offerings didn’t create the problem. It was always there. They’ve just made it worse by tapping into this thick vein of fear and bigotry that is likely being underserved by local journalism. As Molla points out, small news entities have been dying off, leaving a void that’s been filled by neighborhood-focused social media outlets. Like anything else, the potential of positive development was always there. It’s just that those who use the services the most tend to be the type who view people of other races, creeds, etc. as inherently suspicious.

The solution, unfortunately, is better inputs. The researchers Molla spoke to suggest “better media literacy” and “more mindful consumption of news.” Let’s be honest: if those are the choices, it’s never going to happen. The selling of a crime-filled America happened as crime rates dropped precipitously. Journalists sold it. Politicians sold it. Massive echo chambers were constructed and the apps that might have disrupted this have instead, for the most part, amplified the echoes.

The information has always been out there. It’s just always ignored by those whose personal beliefs can’t be swayed by stats and alternate viewpoints. Tech isn’t going to fix it. It’s up to us, as individuals, to try to pierce through this haze created by hundreds of entities whose existence depends on the public believing the nation is unsafe. And that’s the hitch: you’re not just going up against friends and neighbors. You’re going up against entrenched beliefs held by government agencies and media concerns that have monetized fear successfully for decades.

Filed Under: fear, neighbors, overhype, social media
Companies: amazon, citizen, nextdoor