W.W
God Father
Sex Workers Have Been Banned From Airbnb for Years. Will You Be Next?
Freya was planning a Christmas vacation to a small seaside town when she received a notification: Airbnb had not only canceled her booking but also suspended her account. When she asked why, Airbnb asked her to verify her identity, which she did by submitting her photo ID.
That afternoon, Airbnb sent her an e-mail: “After reviewing your account and the information available, we’ve determined that your account should be removed from the Airbnb platform…. We found that information in your account is linked to activity—online ads for adults [sic] services, which can include escort activity and commercial pornography—that doesn’t comply with the Safety section of our Community Standards.”
Within the sex work community, Airbnb is notorious for its aggressive surveillance practices and draconian banning policies. Officially, the platform’s policies prohibit “in-call commercial sex work” and “procuring sex work,” as well as “commercial pornography”—but there’s nothing barring people who sell (or buy) sex from using the service to take a vacation. (Banning someone for “being a sex worker” too closely resembles discrimination to make it past a legal team.)
That said, whorephobia—the systemic oppression of sex workers that is so ubiquitous its codification in something like a terms-of-service policy is redundant—is most acutely felt as the denial to sex workers of access to resources.
Rather than ease up throughout the pandemic, restrictions on sex workers have gotten increasingly severe, keeping pace with our growing dependence on technology. As I wrote this summer for Wired, sex workers are the canaries in the coal mine for state violence. One manifestation of this violence is the algorithmic surveillance of sex workers, which is both insidious and state-sanctioned: FOSTA/SESTA, a pair of bills designed to cut into Section 230 under the auspices of “fighting sex trafficking,” is intentionally vague. By banning any use of the Internet to “facilitate prostitution,” FOSTA effectively criminalizes the online presence of not only sex workers but also those who are in close proximity to us. From our roommates to our cab drivers, technological whorephobia threatens guilt by association.
Freya didn’t use Airbnb properties for sex work, but she had her suspicions about how Airbnb flagged her. In May of 2020, before adopting cryptocurrency, she was paying for escorting advertisements with her credit card. Data sharing between platforms could have led Airbnb to algorithmically put two and two together.
But then Freya’s partner, who has no history of sex work but was also listed on the booking, tried to sign into Airbnb. He, too, was asked to submit photo identification to access his account.
About five hours later, Airbnb sent him a similar response: “We’ve removed you from the Airbnb platform because your account is closely associated with a person who isn’t allowed to use Airbnb. For the safety of our community, we may remove accounts that are closely associated with people who aren’t allowed to use Airbnb.”
If you’re not a sex worker, then you may not see a problem with a private company’s restricting its user base, especially when targeting such an unsavory population. The Airbnb Community’s “Welcome guest” online message board reveals hosts’ deep fears that, in their absence, their properties will be overrun by “pimps” and “prostitutes.” Hosts exchange tips and tricks for how to identify sex workers, as well as how to politely decline our bookings without overtly violating discrimination policies.
If you’re not a sex worker, then you may also be incredulous that Airbnb would effectively issue a blanket ban on us—a practice that Airbnb has denied over the past several years. Even if you agree that we don’t deserve access to services like Airbnb, the mass suspension of sex workers’ accounts raises several concerns: How do they know who’s a sex worker? If the property isn’t being used for sex work, then why do they care? And if sex workers are indeed being targeted, then why would Airbnb deny the practice that seems to correspond directly to hosts’ values?
In March of 2016, Mistress Julie Simone tweeted that her Airbnb account had been suspended with no explanation. While Airbnb did not explicitly deny that Simone had been suspended for her history of sex work, it never offered an explanation for her account’s termination. Consequently, coverage of the incident by Splinter and the Daily Dot bear almost identical headlines, each asking: Did Airbnb ban a user just because she’s a sex worker?
FULL ARTICLE HERE
