Sources detail Citizen's efforts to cash in on vigilantism, including flooding users with notifications to make them anxious enough to buy its premium service
Internal documents, messages, and roadmaps show how crime app Citizen is pushing the boundary of what a private, app-enabled vigilante force may be capable of.
VICEJoseph Cox
Context & Ripple Effects
Citizen has spent two years circling the same question: how to turn a free crime-alert network into revenue. Coverage of its surge during the BLM protests already flagged the company 'pondering monetization' while tweaking a service whose social layer was adding to a climate of fear — and today's reporting answers how it chose to do it, with internal documents showing notifications tuned to manufacture the anxiety that premium tiers convert into subscriptions.
The timing compounds an existing credibility problem. Just days earlier, a Citizen host falsely accused a man of arson to roughly 860K users, dangling $30K for information before the company admitted the mistake. Leaked emails also show Citizen testing an on-demand private security service that responds where users request it — meaning the alert pipeline, the bounty-style broadcasts, and a paid response force are converging into one product.
First-order effects
Users in Citizen's NYC, SF Bay Area, Baltimore, and LA coverage areas now sit at the end of a notification funnel explicitly designed to heighten perceived danger, with safety information functioning as the upsell for premium subscriptions.
The company is simultaneously operating a broadcast system that has already misfired publicly — the arson accusation — while expanding toward a paid private-response service, so its error rate becomes a direct product-safety liability rather than a content-moderation footnote.
Second-order effects
Competitors and adjacent players in consumer safety apps face pressure to match engagement-driven notification volume, since Citizen's model rewards frequency of alerts over accuracy — a race to the bottom on alarm fatigue across the category.
If the on-demand security service scales, private responders dispatched by user reports will operate alongside police in the same incidents, forcing cities to decide what accountability applies to a vigilante force one app can summon.
Third-order effects
A structural template emerges where fear itself is the monetizable asset: platforms profit by amplifying perceived threat, then selling relief from it — an incentive structure regulators have not yet built a framework to touch.
Private, app-coordinated response forces could normalize a two-tier safety market in which paid subscribers get faster protection, shifting policing-adjacent power from public institutions to whoever owns the alert network.
The trend: Consumer safety apps are evolving from passive crime scanners into paid private-security platforms whose business models depend on amplifying the very fear they claim to relieve.
SCOOP: We have everything that happened at Citizen when it put a bounty on an innocent man's head. Internal comms before, during, and after. Some of the wildest behavior I have ever seen in my entire life: https://www.vice.com/...
Fantastic story exposing a bunch of greedy dystopian idiots, aka those running the crime ‘safety’ app, Citizen. Truly Orwellian https://twitter.com/...
Really incredible how every story about Citizen is an order of magnitude more dystopian than the last. This is their in-house streaming news show talking to the app's users about a guy who did NOT start a wildfire. They spent hours saying he did. https://www.vice.com/... https://…
I have a lot of notes for a third Zoey book if the publisher wants one, but I have to say, it's hard for satirical sci-fi about the future of crime and vigilantism to keep ahead of the reality. For example, witness the Citizen vigilante social media app: https://www.vice.com/... …
This story reminds me of when redditors on r/GreatAwakening doxxed the wrong guy accused of carrying out a shooting, Reddit had the good sense to close the sub and ban QAnon. I'm not sensing that similar good sense will prevail here. https://twitter.com/...
The Media: 2021 is gonna be the roaring '20s! Fun and Games! Get your party hat on! Reality: We have brought back bounty hunting https://twitter.com/...
all these leaked documents make pretty clear: Citizen is a coordinated effort to amplify and incentivize racist paranoia and then profit by selling access to a de facto vigilante security force https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/...
I hope the person wrongly accused by a mob using the evil “Citizen” app ends up owning the company and shutting it down after a lawsuit. https://www.vice.com/... If you're using this vigilante app, you are doing the wrong thing.
this latest reporting on Citizen confirms that they're not at all sorry for sending hundreds of thousands of users notifications misidentifying a man as an arsonist, potentially putting his life in danger, and they absolutely want to be the private police https://www.vice.com/...
I thought we were all keeping an eye on the Americans but at some point they all started installing bounty hunter apps on their phones? https://twitter.com/...
Citizen's CEO explicitly calling for the monetization and growth hacking of fear is the dystopian future we were warned about, but I never quite saw coming. Uninstall the app for the sake of your own mental health, or at very least before it gets someone innocent killed. https://…
The most damning quote IMO in this entire leak is the CEO of Citizen explicitly saying that if the company does more reckless stuff like put bounties on peoples' heads, they will get more app users. It's the actual quote https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@mhbergen at the risk of giving a column away in a tweet, this is why i think the “change the business model!!” school of social network criticism is misguided. Citizen's business model is subscriptions and it's still fucking awful
Citizen's CEO on starting a massive manhunt against the wrong person: “A massive net win,” and “the team came together on a Saturday and pulled off something incredibly awesome.” https://www.vice.com/...
I have never seen a more damning Slack leak. Citizen CEO frothing at the mouth, putting a price on the head of an innocent man. this company is off the rails https://www.vice.com/...
NEW: Inside account of what happened at Citizen, the crime app formerly known as Vigilante, as its founder led a livestreamed bounty hunt for an innocent man https://www.vice.com/...
“It's basically an anxiety sweatshop,” a Citizen source said. “On days when things are ‘slow,’ they relax the standards around incidents because a dip in incident count is really bad.” https://www.vice.com/...
The App is being run by people who want to scare you into paying $20 a month for it. “It's basically an anxiety sweatshop... On days when things are ‘slow,’ they relax the standards around incidents because a dip... is really bad.” @SPOTNEWSonIG @CWBChicago https://twitter.com/..…
this story about Citizen's completely unhinged behind-the-scenes process of frothing people into angry, racist mobs is unbelievable https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/...
The inside story of what happened at Citizen when the crime app company put a bounty on an innocent man's head. A scary story of how a company is trying to cash in on vigilantism. https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/...
“FIND THIS FUCK,” he told them. “LETS GET THIS GUY BEFORE MIDNIGHT HES GOING DOWN.” “BREAKING NEWS. this guy is the devil. get him,” Frame said. “by midnight!@#! we hate this guy. GET HIM.” https://www.vice.com/...
We've found that Citizen claimed the app helped find a missing autistic teen. What the app failed to mention that the people who found the boy are a secret “Street Team” of Citizen employees who go out to events and film them. They're not ordinary users. https://www.vice.com/... …
New: here is our definitive investigation into how crime app Citizen is dangerously trying to monetize vigilantism. Documents, Slack chats, product maps, 8 sources “I didn't anticipate the ways they would circumvent the police and go that much further.” https://www.vice.com/...
Incredible reporting from @jason_koebler and @josephfcox on what's going on inside Citizen. A truly jaw-dropping look at a company (and a CEO) trying to cash in on some warped idea of vigilante justice: https://www.vice.com/...