Whistleblower alleges Airbnb undermined team focusing on eliminating users promoting extremist views.
Jess Hernandez served as an investigations analyst for Airbnb's hazardous groups team from May 2022 to November 2023, where she researched extremist groups as part of the company's efforts to keep harmful individuals away from the platform. However, she was reportedly let go in November 2023, shortly after her team was ordered by management to restore users who were previously banned for their involvement in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
Whistleblower Aid, the group representing Hernandez, stated that Airbnb had been scaling back and undermining the efforts of its team responsible for removing individuals associated with dangerous or extremist organizations from the platform since 2023. This, according to them, "privately abandoned its public commitment to its hosts' and guests' safety and security under this policy."
Hernandez submitted the whistleblower disclosure to the US Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Trade Commission in May. The complaint was first reported by NBC. CNN has not viewed the complaint and could not independently verify the details provided in the NBC report.
Airbnb refuted Hernandez's claims, asserting that it continues to prohibit members of dangerous or extremist organizations.
"Contrary to these unfounded and inaccurate allegations, we have in fact expanded the scope of our team to identify and purge users who pose a safety risk, and this year we have recruited additional team members to support the enforcement of this policy," an Airbnb spokesperson said in a statement. "As a digital platform that facilitates tens of millions of real-world connections worldwide, we have robust policies, processes, and teams across the company focused on promoting community safety, including preventing hazardous users from using the platform."
Airbnb boasts more than 5 million hosts who list properties on the room and home-rental platform. In the first three months of 2024 alone, Airbnb arranged more than 132 million nights and "experiences," which include non-overnight offerings such as walking tours.
The whistleblowing complaint emerges as Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has been trying for years to address safety concerns associated with a business model that essentially involves strangers staying in the homes of other strangers. Steps taken include crackdowns on parties, resources for solo female travelers, and a ban on indoor security cameras.
In 2016, Airbnb asked members to commit to "accept people regardless of their race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or age" to host or make a reservation on the platform. In subsequent years, the company pointed to this pledge when banning users linked to extremist organizations.
In 2017, the company removed some accounts and canceled bookings linked to the Unite the Right White nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In 2021, following the January 6 attack, Airbnb declared that it had eliminated "numerous individuals" who were identified as having participated in the violent activity at the US Capitol. It added that it canceled reservations in the Washington DC metro area during inauguration week in response to calls from local and federal authorities.
However, in 2023, Airbnb faced criticism from conservative media for eliminating the parents of far-right activist Lauren Southern from the platform and subsequently reversed the removal, calling it a "mistake." Southern, a far-right Canadian YouTube personality, had criticized her parents' removal on social media and later on Fox News.
Around the same time, Hernandez alleges that Airbnb slowed down and complicated the dangerous groups team's work, requiring proposed removals to be approved by legal, communications, and community policy department leaders, according to NBC, which said it received Hernandez's 161-page complaint from an anonymous source on Capitol Hill.
"Our hands were tied — we weren't removing people," Hernandez told NBC.
Before her tenure at Airbnb, Hernandez was a researcher for the Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium, an organization that monitors terrorist and hate groups.
Read also:
Airbnb's business strategy in tech also involves maintaining robust policies to promote community safety, including the removal of hazardous users associated with extremist organizations. Despite these commitments, Hernandez claims that the company's tech team responsible for this task experienced slowdowns and complications in their work in 2023.
