Airbnb agrees to hide US guest names in bid to tackle racism
Booking platform Airbnb has announced it will hide the names of its US guests from hosts until after their booking has been accepted.
The rule change follows an Oregan lawsuit in which three black women alleged that the use of names and photographs on the site facilitated racial discrimination. The suit was settled in 2019 and 2021 with Airbnb agreeing to change its rules to allow hosts in Oregan to only see the initials of customers before bookings are accepted in a bid to tackle racism, Metro first reported.
“Airbnb has no tolerance for discrimination, and we have taken a number of steps to help fight bias,” the company said in a statement.
“We changed the way we display profile photos to encourage more objective bookings. And to help us more effectively identify and work to eliminate disparities in how our community members experience Airbnb,” the statement added.
In a statement Airbnb said the change would come into effect at the end of the month and remain in place for at least the next two years.
In June 2020 Airbnb launched Project Lighthouse, a tool which measures racial bias on the company’s website, in partnership with Colour of Change, a civil rights activist group. The project was a response to reports of racial bias on the website which were shared widely on Twitter under the hashtag #airbnbwhileblack.
The reports were backed-up by a 2016 study by Harvard researchers which found that applications from guests with distinctively African-American names were 16 per cent less likely to be accepted by hosts on the site relative to identical guests with distinctively white names.
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