A webcam mounted to a home and trained on a three-way intersection in Salem, Massachusetts, has gone viral.
Drivers in the area tend to take one stop sign as more of a suggestion rather than a law.
"I just kept getting interested in it because more and more cars just kept blowing past the stop sign, so I decided to tweet it out, and then it just kind of got an audience from there," said popular social media influencer @JhbTeam, who lives all the way in Los Angeles.
But he was so entertained by the Twitch stream of the "StopSignCam" in Massachusetts that he made a TikTok video about it, which got about a million views.
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"I think my favorite part of the stream is when people show up to the stop sign," he said. "They'll do funny dances, they'll backflip, or lightsaber fights, you never know what's going to happen."
But as you might imagine, the antics started creating problems and privacy concerns for neighbors.
"People were ordering food to the homes, and then watching deliveries being made. Other people would take selfies outside the home," said Salem Traffic and Parking Director David Kucharsky.
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"I think that's an invasion of privacy," said neighbor Anthony Reynoso. "It bothers all of our neighbors, you know, everybody constantly knowing our every move, coming in and out of our house."
The owner of the home where the cameras are mounted didn't want to go on camera and says she's not running the livestream and never expected it to go viral.
@JhbTeam says he wants to be clear that he doesn't support viewers harassing anyone seen on the feed.
"I totally dislike how people are getting into the privacy of those people," he said.
And Kucharsky says he wants to assure residents they're working on finding a solution to stop the stop sign scofflaws through more traditional measures.
"They should reach out to us directly and not to the various social media platforms," he said.
After several neighbors raised concerns about privacy issues, the StopSignCam feed switched to a different camera at a nearby intersection.
But interest in the feed has not waned. As of Thursday, there were still more than 200,000 people watching it.
