>> Nextdoor and the public agencies it works with say that close ties between the social media platform and the government can help them both do their jobs bett

>> Nextdoor and the public agencies it works with say that close ties between the social media platform and the government can help them both do their jobs better. The thing is, that's true. It's the way they're going about it and the fact that it's a messy public / private mix that raises ethical concerns. At some point we're going to need to rethink an official channel for government communications. Think about it: how dependent on social media have many of us been to find out the latest public health mandates? And how well do we feel like social media deals with fake news and fraud and privacy? The combination of those two is a big problem. There needs to be a better official communications platform. The US Postal Service was seen as very fundamental to the forming of its government. Now, ignoring the financial woes and plundering by Congress, and ignoring the very lousy and incompetent service you can get from it in some places, it just has fundamental limitations in cost, speed, level of non-repudiation, etc. It's largely become a subsidized junk mail / litter distribution network. It's how I'm supposed to get official correspondence from the IRS, but it's harder than it should be to know it REALLY came from the IRS, and to prove that I REALLY replied on time, and to actually work towards a resolution. We can't use it for all our elections because of (real or not) fraud concerns so we use more inconvenient forms of voting. If you need to take someone to court you can't trust it, so you have to pay for expensive process service. It doesn't get used to notify me of changes in laws that affect me, like I might get fined if I go to the park with my kids tomorrow. It can't be used to tell me that I can't park my car where I usually do in 72 hours because of time-sensitive maintenance, we instead pay someone to put a note on my door and hope it doesn't blow away. It's not great. The de facto solution? Rely on NextDoor and Facebook. And we get ethical dilemmas like this article. I really think at some point we need to declare some kind of Internet access a fundamental need as much as service by USPS (which is required to service every address) has been in the past, and not rely on private infrastructure for basic government services like this. As someone who tends to be libertarian and lives somewhat off-grid a lot of the time, I see the difficulties and fully expect that our government would screw up the execution of this. But at some point I think it's necessary and inevitable to at least try. The most basic functions of government could be done so much better.