FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 18, 2024

MEDIA CONTACT
Radim Dragomaca, [email protected] 

Airbnb Quietly Dismantled its Team Investigating Use of the Platform by Members of Dangerous Organizations, Whistleblower Aid Client Reveals 

Whistleblower Aid calls on Airbnb to invest in user safety, calls for investigation into the company’s deceptive and dangerous practices. 

Washington, D.C., June 18, 2024 – Airbnb spent much of 2023 scaling back and undermining the work of its team tasked with removing individuals affiliated with dangerous and extremist organizations from the platform. A former member of that team has exposed that Airbnb has been deceiving its customers and shareholders by continuing to publicly tout their policy and commitment to safety while internally abandoning it. 

Jess Hernandez was a member of Airbnb’s Dangerous Organizations (DO) team who specialized in researching extremist networks. She was stunned to find Airbnb’s leadership turning against the work of the DO team following negative partisan media coverage of one of their removals. 

Ms. Hernandez’s whistleblower disclosure filed with the U.S. government details the dismantling of the DO team’s work, including shrinking the team and preventing them from directly removing dangerous users. Critically, members of the team saw their attempts to escalate cases and recommend removals go mostly unheeded by leadership. The cumulative effect was that Airbnb privately abandoned its public commitment to its hosts’ and guests’ safety and security under this policy. 

Contrary to her experience in 2022 when the DO team robustly enforced their policy, in the final ten months of her employment Ms. Hernandez can count on the fingers of one hand the number of accounts  – out of 150 million users – where her efforts helped to remove dangerous individuals. Ms. Hernandez was terminated by Airbnb in November of 2023, shortly after she and her team were informed by management that Airbnb intended to reinstate the accounts of previously removed January 6 insurrectionists. 

“Airbnb’s customers stay in the homes of strangers, and rely on the company’s publicly stated commitment to safety to protect them,” Libby Liu, CEO of Whistleblower Aid, said today. “They will be shocked to learn that Airbnb may be exposing them to individuals affiliated with violent hate groups where they sleep, eat and spend time with friends and family. We are calling on the government to investigate Airbnb’s apparent misrepresentations that directly impact the safety and security of its guests and hosts. This important disclosure is indicative of a wider failure by companies in the shared economy to prioritize user safety. Placing profits over safety is shortsighted, dangerous and fails to meet the moment when extremism is on the rise in our country.”

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Whistleblower Aid provides pro bono legal, advocacy, and communications support to government and private sector whistleblowers acting in the public interest. The organization’s lawyers have represented some of the most consequential national security and Big Tech whistleblowers in history, including the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, the anonymous intelligence community whistleblower whose disclosures led to the first impeachment of President Trump, and others.

Whistleblower Aid is a 501(c)(3) organization.