Airbnb Used Facebook and Twitter to Weed Out Hate Groups

The company, now the most valuable hospitality firm by market capitalization after a blockbuster initial public offering last month, generates far more media attention than competitors Booking, Expedia or hotel chains like Marriott, and has publicly taken more aggressive stances aimed at preventing participants in potentially violent gatherings from using its rentals.

Efforts by Twitter, Facebook and other social networks to purge far-right extremists and shut down organizing groups are likely to make the work of spotting fringe groups more difficult for Airbnb. The work already has added to the caseload facing the company’s trust and safety unit, which also tries to monitor and block people who cause extensive property damage, hold large house parties or try to use rentals for sex trafficking.

Airbnb is especially sensitive to any associations that might harm its high-profile brand. Nick Shapiro, a former Airbnb crisis management executive who left the company in 2019, said that Airbnb executives worried about the impact potentially dangerous guests would have on the company’s image. “The reputation of the company is in the hands of its users,” Shapiro said.

Blocking extremists from using its site also aligns with the company’s broader anti-discrimination efforts, born out of high-profile incidents several years ago in which some hosts on the site blocked Black guests from booking. With a policy staff stocked with former Obama administration officials, the company also is unusually attuned to political currents.

“When signals suggest a hate group member may be using Airbnb, we investigate and take appropriate action. This information can come to us in many ways—including flags from members of our community, social media users or news articles,” said Ben Breit, an Airbnb spokesperson.

Airbnb policy bars members of “violent racist groups.” According to a current employee, the customers with those tendencies “have a rightward slant.” The Airbnb spokesperson said the company was concerned “about violence and people who commit violent acts regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.”

Monitoring New Year’s Eve

Airbnb’s efforts to police users go beyond scoping out extremists. Over the past year, the company has had to increase scrutiny of customers following a spate of house parties and shootings at Airbnb rentals. Hoping to prevent unruly gatherings, the company late last year halted some single-night reservations for New Year’s Eve made by customers who hadn’t previously received positive reviews from Airbnb hosts, Airbnb said.

Following the Jan. 6 attack, the company went further, blocking all reservations in the Washington, D.C., area this week after local lawmakers urged people not to travel to the area for President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration. Airbnb also said it was reviewing reservations made near some state capitals to determine if customers were associated with violent hate groups.

In trying to root out potentially ill-intentioned guests, Airbnb limits its searches to publicly available posts and doesn’t interact with customers via the fake accounts, one of the employees said. Sometimes prospective customers have linked their Airbnb logins with Facebook accounts, making their online behavior easy to track. In other instances, rental-home hosts discovered that guests had been in the news as members of extremist groups and reported it to the company.

Nevertheless, the tactics, which law enforcement often uses in criminal investigations, raise questions about how far Airbnb should go to prevent certain individuals from using its service.

Dror Poleg, who has written a book about real estate technology and is co-chair of the Urban Land Institute’s Tech and Innovation Council, said Airbnb’s approach might give the company too much sway over matters outside its business purview.

“It’s pushing the company to be an arbiter on issues that are explicitly national security issues,” Poleg said. “Where do you draw the line between the responsibilities of these platforms and [the] responsibilities of government institutions?”

Industry Exception

Airbnb and its HotelTonight subsidiary have stood alone among prominent hospitality firms in blocking all bookings in Washington, D.C., in the days surrounding the inauguration. Expedia-owned home-rental site Vrbo said Monday it would cross-check reservations against federal databases to make sure guests hadn’t participated in the Capitol siege. Booking Holdings, the world’s largest accommodations booking site, didn’t cancel reservations, nor did Marriott, Hyatt or Hilton.

Before the Jan. 6 attack, Airbnb already had been among the most aggressive among technology or travel firms in restricting right-wing fringe groups. In 2017, the company banned groups of neo-Nazis planning to stay in rentals in Charlottesville, Va., for the “Unite the Right” rally.

The decision to block bookings by far-right groups and individuals emerged after debate inside Airbnb leading up to the Charlottesville rally, in which a white supremacist killed a counterprotester. Blocking guests with certain affiliations was a sensitive subject for a firm that has used “belong anywhere” as a tagline. Some of the company’s top lawyers thought banning far-right users could send the signal that it was blocking customers based solely on their political views.

Other executives, including Director of Community Policy Dave Willner and Chris Lehane, policy chief, advocated for the more aggressive approach that Airbnb ended up taking. CEO Brian Chesky also supported the more aggressive steps.

Another employee said Lehane, the company’s senior vice president for global policy and communications, cut through the debate with a simple message. “Chris looked at it and explained, ‘We’re either pro-Nazi or anti-Nazi. We should be anti-Nazi. Let’s ban.’”

Shapiro, the former Airbnb executive, who now runs a crisis-planning consulting firm, 10th Avenue Consulting, said he was part of the discussions around Charlottesville and supported Airbnb’s move to clamp down then. But he acknowledged there was concern among other staff that Airbnb might be overreaching.

“There is an episode of ‘Black Mirror’ about this,” Shapiro said, referring to a 2016 episode of the British TV series in which businesses deny service to people based on the negative online ratings they receive from other businesses or individuals. “There have to be safeguards in place, principles around these decisions, oversight in how it’s used.”