Mixed signals: Nextdoor villains and the holiday you've never heard of

Endless Thread

Producers Grace Tatter and Frannie Monaghan host a two-part episode exploring how online personas clash with real-life consequences and how AI can be manipulated by coordinated misinformation. The first story follows Amy Brown, who

Key takeaways

• Amy Brown, a social media-savvy writer, faced intense backlash on Nextdoor after her critical Blue Sky posts about senior citizens opposing a library tax were screenshotted and shared locally.
• The El Cerrito library tax debate highlighted generational and economic divides, with Amy initially misjudging the financial strain of fixed incomes on older residents.

Main topics

• Hyperlocal social media platforms
• Online personas vs IRL behavior

Notable quotes

"I could not see them as like full human beings who live in my neighborhood because I've gotten so used to seeing the person I'm arguing with on the internet through the lens of their one bad opinion"

Conclusion

Listeners gain a reflective takeaway on maintaining empathy across dig

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:01) Amory. Benny B. Johnson. We've got a special treat today. A producer-led episode. Orchestra's out of the pit. The sailors are steering the ship. Speaker 5 (0:13) Love a producer takeover. Speaker 6 (0:15) Yeah. So get ready for that. But first, we are working on an episode that we want to get your help with. Speaker 5 (0:21) We want to do some international travel. Some memetic international travel. Speaker 6 (0:27) Yeah, I was sending a song around that I found on Reddit the other day. It's a German song that was like, I'm sick of my boss. All I want is bass. Speaker 6 (0:41) And that got us thinking, we'd love to know more about memes outside of the American meme bubble. Speaker 5 (0:49) Yeah, and we need your help for this, obviously. So do you have a favorite meme from a country or a culture outside of the U.S.? We know you guys are cosmopolitan with your memes. And some of you are just listening outside of the U.S. You're in Japan, you're in Ireland, New Zealand, the Netherlands. We know you're out there. So what do you got? Speaker 6 (1:09) Please send your favorite international memes and why you love them to endlessthread at wbur.org. Speaker 5 (1:17) And in the meantime, we're going to hand it off to producers Grace Tatter and Frannie Monaghan. Here's the show. WBUR Podcasts, Speaker 4 (1:26) Boston. Speaker 4 (1:34) Frannie Monaghan, fellow producer of Endless Thread. Grace Tatter, fellow producer of Endless Thread. Today is another producer takeover. I'm so excited to do one of these. Yes. Speaker 4 (1:50) So Frannie, I have a story for you that's about a woman named Amy Brown. She recently wrote an essay for the Oakland Review of Books. Okay. About a time that she sent some mixed signals. And Speaker 2 (2:05) her essay starts like this. In April, 2026, my husband and I bought our first home in El Cerrito, California. By the end of June, I'd become public enemy number one on the local next door. This is my story. Speaker 2 (2:20) Oh my God. Speaker 3 (2:22) Yes. Sounds like the intro of a Speaker 4 (2:25) true crime podcast. OK, so Franny, before we get into the crime of it all, are you familiar with Nextdoor? Oh, Speaker 3 (2:35) yes. I am a recent homeowner myself and I love Nextdoor. I don't ever post on Nextdoor. I'm a big Nextdoor lurker, though. Speaker 4 (2:44) Same. I am also a lurker. But for people who don't know, Nextdoor is a hyper-local social media platform, and you have to verify that you actually live in the neighborhood that you're joining. You have to use your real name, and it's a place where you can share recommendations and local news. It can also be a forum to discuss local politics, Speaker 2 (3:07) which is where Amy's troubles began. When we moved to El Cerrito and I joined the El Cerrito Next Door, I realized that El Cerrito was in the middle of kind of like an ongoing political battle, which I sort of stepped right into the middle of. El Speaker 4 (3:22) Cerrito is a small town in the Bay Area, right across from San Francisco. Amy is a writer with a background in social media, which we will come back to. And she never expected to be able to afford a house in El Cerrito. But when a tech company she worked for went public, she and her husband could actually afford a down payment on a house there. Here's the political battle that's going on as Amy settles into her new home. It's about a proposal for a tax to build a new state-of-the-art library. Speaker 2 (3:54) It is something that comes out to like a couple hundred bucks a year. And I'm thinking that sounds great, right? Like I would love for my tax dollars to go to a library. That is something we actively use. I've got small children. I like to read. So yeah, to me, it seemed like kind of a no-brainer. But then also driving around town, I saw a lot of signs that said, library tax, a bad deal for El Cerrito. And I was like, what are those about? Speaker 3 (4:17) Okay. I mean, I'm on her side here. I'm like, I'm all for libraries. What? Speaker 4 (4:22) Yeah, that's how Amy feels. What? And she starts to make some assumptions about who is opposing this new library. It Speaker 2 (4:30) is an unspoken truth of municipal politics that a lot of the people who have time to participate in these things and go to council meetings and be very active might be retired on the older end of things. And it very much seemed on Nextdoor like the anti-library sentiment was coming very heavily from our senior citizens. Speaker 4 (4:48) So that's assumption number one that Amy has, that old people don't want to pay for this new library. Assumption number two is that it's specifically rich old people. Speaker 2 (4:59) El Cerrito is an interesting place. We're built into a hillside with a view of the bay and up at the top of the hill where you have these like sweeping views of the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge and stuff. The houses are very expensive. And then down at the bottom, they get a little cheaper and then there's apartments. And so it's like, it's economically mixed a little bit. And I felt like I was seeing a lot of, a lot of the anti-property tax signs at the top of the hill in front of these really nice houses. Speaker 4 (5:23) So as a millennial without any inherited generational wealth, who kind of thought she'd never be able to buy a house, Amy has feelings about this. I Speaker 2 (5:33) see these people in their nice houses saying they don't want to contribute to our community by paying for a library. And it made me a little mad. Speaker 4 (5:44) So as I mentioned, Amy has a background in social media. She's done social media for really big brands like Wendy's. And she also has her own following and reputation for funny hot takes. By her own admission, she is a shit poster. But Amy Online is really different from Amy IRL. Speaker 2 (6:04) I think it could be potentially surprising to people who