🏘️ 🌐 Your town’s online group matters more than you think

New_ Public Co-Director, Eli Pariser, on our new Local Lab

In one village in New Hampshire, a Google group of neighbors had been a vital, everyday resource for over 15 years. According to a community member named Cait (I’m changing her name to protect her from small-town gossip), this email group was a source of recommendations, services, and neighborly favors. But when it erupted in conflict, the group collapsed. All that usefulness and connection, built up over years, vanished.

You may not think of this as social media, but most towns in America have some sort of general-purpose, locals-only digital forum: a Facebook group, a Google group, a Nextdoor neighborhood. These groups mostly run below the radar — they seem quotidian, maybe even boring. But according to Pew, “about half of US adults say they get their local news from online groups or forums,” more even than from newspapers. If they were strengthened into resilient, flourishing spaces, they could be crucial to reinforcing American democracy. That’s why we’re going to make them a major focus of our work at New_ Public. 

We’re experiencing many crises in America right now, but arguably the meta-crisis is one of social trust. 

For decades, there has been a building body of evidence that when people trust each other — including literally responding “yes” to the question “Can most people be trusted?” — lots of important, positive things are easier: income inequality goes down, personal wellbeing and mental health go up, civic participation goes up, and economic activity and productivity go up. When people trust each other, lots of things are possible. Social trust makes societies, especially democratic societies, work. 

America is in the midst of a decades-long crash in social trust. In the last fifty years, Americans’ trust in one another has declined from almost half to a quarter. 

Affirmative answers to the canonical social trust question in the US. Data here.

Sociologists give many reasons for this. But a significant factor is that the places where we built social trust, including unions, churches, and local clubs, are no longer as big a part of peoples’ lives. This partly has to do with how we spend our time now, but it’s also true that institutions built for the 20th century are not keeping up with our 21st-century digital landscape.

That’s why we’re excited about these local digital spaces. They’ve emerged in many communities to carry the weight these institutions used to take. In the New Hampshire village that relied on its Google group, there wasn't much of a downtown. Even the general store was gone, vacant for years. The digital space filled in essential gaps.

But these groups are fragile. When things get challenging, unsupported digital spaces can break down. In recent years, partisan community members dominated Cait’s group. They became extremely vocal and aggressive, citing unusual news sources, starting huge arguments, and privately contacting individuals to antagonize them. 

Cait’s friend, let’s call him Chris, was the volunteer moderator for the village’s group. It was a thankless, difficult role. There was no one Chris could rely on to help him and no guidebook or set of recommendations. Chris was stuck with whatever tools and settings Google choose to prioritize, or deprecate, for Google Groups. 

Despite Chris’ best efforts, this “wonderful” space, a daily source of utility and connection for over a decade, ceased to function because Chris didn’t have backup — there’s no American Community Moderators Association. 

At their worst, these groups probably contribute to the decline of social trust — contributing to a sense of crime and decay. We have serious concerns about the design of some of these spaces, which can lead to outcomes like casual racism and sexism and become a real obstacle to all neighbors feeling safe and welcome. At their best, though, they’re engines of social trust at a time when we don’t have many of those. 

And the difference between the worst and the best is actually quite manageable. There are a lot of hard problems in America. But the reliability and quality of local digital spaces is one that we can shift, and this could make a huge difference for a lot of people.

Our team at New_ Public is looking at this in these initial ways:

We can support the moderators and administrators who spend a lot of time and energy stewarding these communities and modeling prosocial behavior. They deserve robust resources, as well as reliable peer organizations where they can learn, sharpen skills, and find support. Just like journalists and librarians, the best moderators should have a range of proven practices, ethics, and approaches to inform their work. Making it easier and more fun for people to take care of these spaces is an essential task. 

The other critical piece is the hosting technology — the platforms. We recognize that the mechanics of the platforms, upon which these digital spaces exist, play an important role in their dynamics. In the short term, rather than building something new, we’re going to meet people where they are and work with community stewards on existing platforms. Some of these platforms, like Discord and Slack, offer APIs that can be built on top of. We believe that these sorts of external tools, including some using new AI models, can meaningfully expand the functionality of these spaces for moderators and community members.  

We’re heading into an election that will strain our social trust, and the institutions that build it, even more. Improving these local digital spaces is something we can begin to do now to prepare for the aftermath.

In 2025, even if we still do have a democracy, these could be indispensable spaces where we heal and rebuild trust. And if we don't, people can use these spaces to maintain social connection in a very fraught time. Experts on authoritarianism say that one of the top factors in helping democracies recover from autocracy is having spaces that are not connected to the state where people can talk and be together.

This is a difficult moment in America. But when the going gets tough, Americans build new civic institutions. These innovations have actually been one of America’s great contributions to the world, including public libraries, public schools, and public parks, to name a few. And these innovations often start as small-scale citizen experiments — Sociologist Robert Putnam describes in The Upswing, for example, how public high schools spread from a few isolated communities in the Midwest to the whole country over a few decades. And luckily, digital local forums and groups are already widely used throughout America. To help them evolve into thriving institutions, it won’t take capital investment on the scale of Andrew Carnegie’s library-building movement. We can create a nationwide system of civic infrastructure online. 

To get started, we’re beginning a series of research sprints and pilots that can demonstrate the power of this approach, which we’ll have more to share about soon. We’d love help in identifying who might be good partners here — either from a funding or implementation perspective. We could also use your ideas on who else we should be talking to and what you think additional important interventions could be — as well as your critical feedback, as always. Please feel free to reach out using our contact form.

Social trust may be crashing in America, but that trajectory need not, and cannot, continue. By ensuring that every community has a reliable, adaptable, and vigorous local digital space, we can begin to rebuild trust. 

– Eli Pariser, Co-Director, New_ Public

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