Airbnb Addresses Users’ Concerns of Discrimination
This year, many people took to social media to express frustration with Airbnb, the popular home rental platform. Many people have felt racially discriminated against in the rental process. A 2016 study, by professors at Harvard Business School, demonstrated “that requests from guests with distinctively African-American names are roughly 16% less likely to be accepted than identical guests with distinctively white names”. Many African-American potential guests confirm this situation and the discrimination they feel from it.
On May 7, the first lawsuit accusing Airbnb of racial discrimination was filed. It alleged that an Airbnb host rejected the plaintiff’s initial application but then accepted the same application when the plaintiff re-applied using profiles imitating white men.
Some people are suggesting a loophole in discrimination laws makes Airbnb and hosts exempt from U.S. public accommodation law based on the exceptions that exempts owner-occupied housing accommodations with five rooms or less under the theory that a person renting close quarters has a right to free association with only people they prefer to live with. But, Airbnb’s business model is built on commercial use and subject to discrimination laws that control public accommodation.
Many networks on the rise in Silicon Valley reject the idea that they hold network privilege and stick to the notion that they are just platforms for users to make their own arrangements. Despite this common idea, Airbnb is different. After hearing the complaints and hiring legal experts to conduct a review, Airbnb published a report that committed to put in place “powerful systemic changes to greatly reduce the opportunity for hosts and guests to engage in conscious or unconscious discriminatory conduct”. Some of these changes include a feature to help prevent hosts from rejecting one guest by alleging that their space is unavailable and then renting to another, by automatically blocking the calendar for subsequent reservation requests for that same trip. Airbnb will also work with a team of engineers and designers to experiment with reducing the prominence of guest photos in the booking process.
Neil Henrichsen is an AV rated attorney with decades of experience in civil rights matters and discrimination cases. If you feel you have been discriminated against contact him at nhenrichsen@hslawyers.com.