Image: Wikimedia commons, Lee Park
This weekend, Virginia’s Lee Park is slated to be the meeting place of the Unite The Right rally, a much-publicised gathering of far-right personalities and their sycophants. With less than a week to go, Airbnb has taken active measures to delete the accounts of some members the company believes to be staying in Charlottesville for the rally — making lodging for planned attendees
Canceled my account with airbnb pic.twitter.com/CBwhN6lB0s
— Cracker Factory (@EarthBoisRDumb) August 6, 2017
According to screenshots shared on Twitter, the users have apparently been banned for violating Airbnb’s Terms of Service.
Over the weekend, chatter within far-right spheres alluded to a possible crackdown against those travelling to Virginia to hear white nationalist Richard Spencer, Buzzfeed washout turned fundamentalist Baked Alaska, Augustus Invictus, a one-time Senate hopeful and author of such LinkedIn screeds as Future or Ruin: The Argument for Eugenics and others preach hate in front of a statue of a Confederate general.
In a statement obtained by Gizmodo, an Airbnb spokesperson confirmed the company’s intentions:
In 2016 we established the Airbnb Community Commitment reflecting our belief that to make good on our mission of belonging, those who are members of the Airbnb community accept people regardless of their race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or age. We asked all members of the Airbnb to affirmatively sign on to this commitment. When through our background check processes or from input of our community we identify and determine that there are those who would be pursuing behaviour on the platform that would be antithetical to the Airbnb Community Commitment, we seek to take appropriate action including, as in this case, removing them from the platform.
The company suspects several listings in the area were booked with the intention of holding parties for neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer. The Daily Stormer’s staff have publicly announced their intention to attend Unite The Right. Though Stormer founder Andrew Anglin is not slated to speak at the rally, Richard Spencer’s official Altright.com Discord server had him as a guest for a co-Q&A earlier today.
Altright Discord server
It’s unclear if the banned users have been able to rejoin the platform, but according to screenshots of an email supposedly sent to one such affected user, the bans are “irreversible and will affect any duplicated or future accounts.”
Airbnb has previously overhauled its policies to combat discriminatory host behaviours, with limited success, and added a complaint system for neighbours of loud or unruly guest in May of last year. To the best of our knowledge, this marks the first time the hospitality platform has actively sought to intervene preemptively against guests rather than hosts, and this appears to be a very specific and unusual set of circumstances.
We’ve reached out to two users who claim to have been banned due to their intent to attend Unite The Right and will update if we hear back.