Airbnb to Block and Cancel D.C. Reservations During Inauguration
news.airbnb.com
news.airbnb.com
Makes sense, at first I just assumed it was an unnecessary blanket ban but if the area isn't condoning travel in general it checks out.
What we would have is celebrations at the end of your term, for what you accomplished.
Sorry, you can’t get an Uber to that location because it is the site of a taxi driver protest against ride sharing.
Sorry, you can’t book a flight to that city on that date because there will be an anti-government protest.
Sorry, you can’t order these books from Amazon, because your IP has been detected visiting Parler.com
Forget books, imagine if they did that same analysis and shutdown your AWS accounts because your IP matched one that logged into Parler.
They love shows like Black Mirror for criticizing the totalitarian Social Credit system in China, but now they're urging private companies to build the same system in the US. Being unable to book travel or a hotel is actually one of the penalties if your score falls too low in China.
So You can’t get an Uber to that location? Don't worry use our service instead
This is a company coordinating with local government officials.
Should I complain that Uber doesn’t allow people who didn’t pass background check to work for them, because possibly in the future they may extend it to people who disagree with a certain party? Should I complain that Amazon doesn’t sell rape videos, because later it can stop selling document documentary videos about politicians they don’t like?
I agree that slow creep into utopia is an dangerous option, with “would somebody think about the children” approach. But using that to argument to justify lack of action in response to horrible events that undermine society is more dangerous.
Not to mention the fact that there are a perhaps infinite number of ongoing issues that said companies don’t decide to involve themselves in which would have a much greater effect.
And yeah, there are countless other issues for those companies. But perfect is an enemy of good. They’re allowed to take action, even if they won’t solve all the other problems at the same time.
And on a list of importance to the companies, not enabling violent government overthrow attempts is in their best interest, even once you strip all the politics. It’s a country where those companies are based, make most of their revenue, and where they’re listed on a stock market.
If Uber prevents people from working from them who disagree with a certain party, people can sue them and argue that it isn't a justified restriction. Preventing people from working who don't pass a background check is justified, because it protects the safety of customers (assuming the background check doesn't unfairly weed out certain groups).
Whatever restrictions are required / allowed / banned is up to society as a whole. Probably we would generally err on the side of allowing things, because we like freedom, but ban anything which most agree is illegal, immoral, or dangerous.
I thought this was a joke but then I read the rest.
The government, and the many non-profits that benefit from their unique positions with government, are precisely the "enemy" of the people Airbnb are supposedly protecting us against. It would be ridiculous, self-serving, and entirely wasteful to do anything like this, especially led by the government.
Couldn't you just as easily argue that NOT doing anything about a losing president trying to overturn democracy is a much more slippery slope to something far worse? If you simply acknowledge this in your comments, trust me, your points will be taken more seriously.
Don't worry, many of us who consider the far-right actions insane insurrection and conspiracy theory still do believe in free-speech, and will speak up for it if it goes too far (e.g. your third example). It's kinda insincere to jump to these slippery-slope conclusions though, and I think you know that in your heart of hearts. It's pretty trivial to take any real-world phenomenon and contrive how it could be exaggerated to the point it's bad ("Police shooting an armed criminal? What's next police shooting babies?!?" "President bragging how he could shoot a person in the street? What's next, president shooting people in the street?!?").
I see the obvious slippery-slope argument being made all over the place but the comparisons to the bakery refusing service to a gay couple are apt.
The concerns are over people who clearly want to leverage the platforms to induce violence (read: QAnon). If there are legitimate concerns over imminent violence, there is no legal obligation to halt service but there is absolutely a moral one.
And the free market allows others companies to continue providing service if they want. If the concern is over companies with massive market share then wouldn't your concern better be addressed by antitrust laws?
Giving the government the power to force businesses to do business with parties against their will based on politics is pretty scary to me. I'd rather see companies like Uber broken up so that consumers have a lot more choice than see the government given even more power over our lives.
That's got to be an enormous dollar amount.
Edit: in fact, the more I think about it, the more I realize it could be the other way around too - the insurers could have told AirBnB to cancel all reservations in DC, because they are unwilling to take the risk. They might have calculated it would be cheaper to pay everyone off upfront for the reservations, than risk much larger liability cases if they go forward with them.
https://twitter.com/DaniellaMicaela/status/13493525298685788...
They're there to protect the building and the people in it from people who would stay at an AirBnB the night before an attack.
What happens if you decide that in fact it is not good that Biden instigated a war with the next brown country that is going to get it because the American war machine has lust in its eye and psychopathic military brass needs a promotion for a fatter pension and benefits that depends on killing people somewhere, anywhere?
So is this the paradigm for when protests happen that the government and corporations don't like and just want to shut down? No, I know, they would never shut down your righteous cause and protest because you are the good bois.
They'll simply not let you board a plane (maybe even put you too on a no fly list?)? Not rent a car to you? Deny you a hotel/airbnb, possibly for life? Your apps/phones stop working within a geofence around any government building? You can't eat in a restaurant? You cannot buy anything by payment processor/visa/MC? The only left over mega corporations will not take cash?
People who have done this, which is overwhelmingly on the "left" side of the spectrum, should really take a pause and think really long and really hard about what they have unleashed here; because no matter what I don't see how this demon will be put back into pandora's box without full collapse. Once you have relinquished control over your life to the government/corporate fascist type alliance, you can ask nicely all you want, you aren't getting that power over your life back from these types of people by any peaceful means. History is replete with the proof after proof for how this will all play out unfortunately.
Edit: It is interesting to see my comment downvoted. Taking part in such acts and not expecting consequences is naive at best.
Why didn’t they shut down operations across the country when COVID became a known, valid threat? They facilitated the spread of the disease.
If the “left side of the spectrum” does any of that, feel free to cancel their credit cards too.
You seem to be forgetting the immediate cause - the insurrection. Individuals (both left and right leaning) lose ground while entrenched power (both left and right flavored) gains - but these events were set in motion by the political right.
I'm dreading the knee-jerk heavy-handed responses, but after what has occurred they're inevitable. The surest way to get congresscritters to unilaterally act is to directly threaten their own personal safety. Furthermore, bringing organized violence to the table completely changes the game - those social media bans are better seen as a reaction to novel criminal liability rather than a mere escalation of the section 230 battle.
As a libertarian, what's truly disappointing is seeing what was probably our last chance at direct rebellion get wasted to assuage one proto-fascist simpleton's ego with a fake narrative of a stolen election. That's not the kind of movement that could possibly gain momentum by demonstrating its justness. I've always believed that personal computing is a better hope for freedom than expecting any herd of people to move in a productive direction, and these events just hammer it home.
> Airbnb's mission is to help create a world where you can belong anywhere and where people can live in a place, instead of just traveling to it.
How does blocking people staying in DC help Airbnb mission? Freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and mission statements are ideals to follow - no matter where you are in the society - or it's just hypocritical.
It may be, given covid, the right decision, but it’s an infringement nevertheless.
This is not a story about trampling of rights. This is actually a story about what happens once a party loses the presumption of good faith. After 1/6 a lot of people are looking at the planned inauguration "protest" and saying "No, I think you're going to try another insurrection and I want no part of it".
Good lord this is getting silly.
Let’s put it this way, if we hold that we must require companies to help protests because of the right to free assembly, that means that the local Starbucks wouldn’t be allowed to expel rowdy patrons so long as they’re “assembled”.
To force AirBnB to do business against their will in order to support a political protest would in fact be authoritarian.
Just saw your edit. What regulations aren't authoritarian? I am exploring your use of terms before we end up loading up too much unnecessary meaning.
Rights like speech, association, and assembly come in a positive and negative form. You have just as much of a right to not speak and not associate as you have to speak and assemble. For fairly obvious reasons the right to speak and the right to assemble gets invoked and litigated more often, but First Amendment lawyers typically have held that forcing parties to speak against their will is equally problematic.
In this case forcing AirBnB to take these people in would be to violate their right to free association. With a few exceptions[0] you are not forced to do business with anyone against your will. The idea that we would trample AirBnB's rights in order to make it easier for someone else to exercise their rights is more than a bit troubling.
> Are there cases where the government can disagree with business and can instead encourage assembly...
The government can encourage all they want. As free citizens you also have the right to give the government the finger and say no.
> or do private ToSes veto that?
Depends on the quality of the ToS. You can't just throw obviously illegal or coercive stuff in a ToS and expect a court to uphold it. But the government has regularly upheld the idea that contracts can contain restrictions that the government could not possibly do, at least as long as the contract is freely entered and well formed. The government might not be able to take away your right to speak, but you can absolutely enter into a NDA that will restrict your right to speak.
Similarly, it's legal to walk around without shoes and a shirt (well, if you're a man). But it's also legal for a business to declare "no shirt, no shoes, no service". This is a ToS "vetoeing" (bad term) someone's right to certain types of behavior within the confines of their own business.
> What regulations aren't authoritarian?
Are speed limits authoritarian? What about food safety ones? Most of us would say "no, those are not authoritarian".
Regulations become authoritarian as they begin to expand in scope and arbitrariness, and when the benefit offered to society does not outweigh the infringement of the regulated parties' rights.
Fundamentally, the government does not have a compelling interest in making it easy for a specific party to assemble and protest. They have an obligation to not make it arbitrarily hard, at least excluding reasonable public safety measures, but it's not their responsibility to ensure that there is adequate housing and transit. The idea that the government might get involved in private businesses to force them, against their will, to assist in a political protest is deeply alarming. Down that road bad things lay.
0 - The obvious exception to the right to not associate is anti-discrimination laws. Within living memory there have been various prejudices so common to effectively lock certain minorities completely out of participation in civic society. Congress and the federal government have persuaded the courts that the state has a compelling interest in ensuring that these minorities are able to participate in society, a compelling interest that outweighs the rights of business owners to decide who they want to do business with. These restrictions are largely based around immutable characteristics such as race, sex, or religion (it's assumed that religious beliefs are deeply held, and nobody can force you to change). This obviously excludes political affiliation, behavior, speech, etc, and therefore isn't relevant in this case.
Your assessment with AirBnB relies very heavily on constitutional rights applying to corporate persons. In the US, they appear to, and in the admittedly little time I have spent looking into it, the precedent for the First Amendment being the basis of rulings for corporate persons is quite recent (only ten years ago with Citizens United v. FEC). Not that this refutes anything, directly – just leaves open the possibility for additional refinement to this interpretation in the future.
> no compelling interest
In the US – perhaps. The EU has been frequently at odds with Californian multinationals. Now Merkel and Marcon, who have been no friends of Trump or his supporters, are getting nervous that several corporate actors on this side of the West, can in conjunction turn off the flow of money and communications for political reasons. If regulations become authoritarian when they expand in scope and arbitrariness, perhaps we can label the regulations that these businesses provide (getting ever closer to the level of commodities and infrastructure, rather than mere luxury consumerism) as the onset of corporate authoritarianism.
You've claimed in other threads that this is primarily a boon to anti-trust as the mechanics for regulating corporate power. I agree with this. I also believe that you underrate the dynamic nature of the private-sector/public-sector relationship. The US government is no stranger to interacting with corporate businesses for their own ends. In the 20th century corporations were the primary means by which the US could construct its empire of foreign influence, next to the Navy and the atomic bomb.
Silicon Valley has proven an interesting exception to certain trends. Where post-WWII technological development was framed as American vs Japanese/Soviet, moving into the 21st century corporations began to associate consumerism with political values, beginning with environmentalism, and then towards social justice. Both consumers and executives became more ideological in a way which fed each other, associating domestic politics with the purchase decision.
This makes the relationship between SV and the government good when the government is progressive, bad when the government is conservative; and it creates an inward-facing form of political corporate power, rather than the outward facing version more familiar to the US. There is some nuance here – Musk and Thiel seem to have a newfound preference for Texas and Florida, owning up to SV's cost of operation, and in Thiel's case, ideological slant – but this trend still holds in the case of social media, payment processors, and hotels. In the last week I've also seen insurance companies get on board in removing the insurance of government officials that weren't specifically Trump.
This is all to say that I would expect more controversy surrounding this interpretation of the First Amendment or freedom of association in the corporate context, contingent on the different pressures that SV has in the future. In the short-run we can expect more willing partnerships between government and private business (over just DoD/In-Q-Tel funding), just based on the administration's alignment with their revealed political standings alone. I would ask, if the government forcing businesses to coordinate with them is scary, how much more for not forcing them?
The long-run will depend partially on Biden winning the good faith of American citizens beyond the initial ~50% that got him elected. Not doing so will make 2024 another slaughterhouse, and there will be likely a lot of conflict surrounding platforming again that, if lost, will make the precedents set in this presidential cycle blowback hard. Beyond that, countries in the EU and beyond have room to apply more pressure on SV which could result in large corporate breakups, or if not, a move in demographic from SV infrastructure to ones more local to each country. This would not be good for the US whatsoever – see for instance the current composition of the S&P 500.
In this way I wouldn't take your argument as final, if you are leaning on existing law. There is a lot of room for improvement, and if enough people are pissed off by the willing combination of corporations and the state in way which deprives certain classes of people for too long, the balance of infringement may not tip in this argument's favor.
Let's not pretend this was an entirely well-meaning and innocent group of people that accidentally made a bad decision.
However, the real answer is that force majeure happened. Enjoyment of rights is a pleasure of peacetime. We're veering towards having a civil war, and so society ends up prioritizing other concerns. That's not a normative statement, but a descriptive one. If you want enjoyment of your rights back sooner, speak out to end this "stop the steal" propaganda campaign.
Eventually, the shoe will be on the other foot, and then there will be threads at the top of the front page decrying these companies' behavior because the community does like the people who were targeted.
I really wish more people could look beyond two inches in front of their face and see the bigger picture. This pattern is not healthy.
As far back as 2018 [0], a UN report pointed to Facebook's lack of moderation on misinformation as a major reason why the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar developed popular support and continued with the approval of the country's politicians. Thousands were killed and a million refugees are now housed in border areas inside neighbouring Bangladesh.
Five people dead on US soil however, and they manage to magically spring into action to prevent further damage.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook...
Disregarding that it's for a good cause...
Surely this should be the Hosts decision? Isn't AirBnB's whole spiel that it's just a middle-man marketplace where buyers and sellers meet?
In one of Jimmy Carter’s books he discusses sneaking out of The White House to go jogging on his own. Of course the secret service wasn’t a fan... it’s depressing to be in DC and our most important public buildings are under heavy security. Now an inauguration, which should be a heavily attended celebration, feels so ominous.
Of course it’s all necessary, it’s just a sad state of affairs with plenty of blame to go around in the past few decades. It just feels so undemocratic, and shows the state of our civil society.
Frankly I wish they'd have done this months ago.
complements to AirBnb that is the right thing to do
Social media was a mistake.
Social media becomes a body politic snatching parasite when it generates unique, algorithmically (engagement-driven!) views for each individual.
By all means, use it to rank things, but showing the numbers just triggers the wrong behaviour. Both in terms of creating addiction in the users, but also in terms of poisoning civil discussion and incentivising clever comebacks over good-faith debate.
Except for dissenting opinions, obfuscated in light gray.
I don't think that social media alone is to blame, nor do I think it is the main culprit, it is an accelerant, but not the cause.
In order for fringe view points to be broadly accepted they need to be "approved"/"verified" by a trusted party.
Now that our news channels, like Fox News, and CNN, spend more time talking about their opinions of the news rather than what occurred, every fringe viewpoint has been stamped as "valid" by appearing on these "news" organizations.
Social media I think exacerbated this problem by reducing revenues for news media companies so they all had to focus on content that was more emotional, rather than informative. And if they can stir up an emotion people tune in.
Then those viewpoints are shared across social media to create a larger audience, again linking back to these "verified" sources, and you get a pretty vicious flywheel effect.
I would love to see what social media looked like if the news went back to reporting just the news.
Like in school, the who, what, when, and that's it. Now when you turn on the news it feels like turning on Inside Edition when I was a kid. Here are the ten things that can kill you in your house hold... tune in after the commercial break to find out.
If our news organizations actually followed these practices it would be interesting to see if social media in and of itself may not be as detrimental as it appears to be today.
There's an opinion piece today in the NYT which argues that the present state of politics, with the rightward and even reactionary shift in certain areas of Republicanism, has been 40 years in the making:
Republicans have been fueling the conditions that enabled Mr. Trump’s rise since the 1980s.
A growing Southern and Western evangelical base pushed the party to replace its big-tent, bipartisan and moderate Republicanism of the mid-20th century with a more conservative version. Under President Dwight Eisenhower, the party had made peace with New Deal social provisioning and backed large-scale federal spending on infrastructure and education. Even as late as the 1970s, President Richard Nixon passed legislation expanding federal regulatory agencies. Yet when Ronald Reagan moved into the White house in 1981, the Republicans sharply slashed government regulations. They cut taxes for the wealthy and oversaw a hollowing out of the American welfare state. At the same time, the party shored up its heavily evangelical base with tough-on-crime policies, anti-abortion rhetoric and coded racist attacks on “welfare queens.”
The full piece is here:
This piece is a perfect example of what raiyu was pointing out.
This is why a lot of countries have state-sponsored media with an obligation to report objectively, but without the pressure to be profitable. With news anchors and journalists that can build up trust and integrity over decades, without the need to sensationalize everything for the sake of viewer numbers. Obviously not a silver bullet either; if there are government officials breathing down their necks instead of shareholders it's probably not much of an improvement, but if enough independence can be maintained it seems to definitely help keeping the discussion civilized.
With a population of that size there are too many minority needs that go under represented. This leads to people feeling disenfranchised. Eventually something has to fill the void. Normally it’s some form of subgroup. It can be BLM, Antifa, Maga cult. By centralizing power into the federal government, which is too remote to deal with needs at the local level, all these groups can’t improve things. Riots and violence occur.
Trying to solve a social problem technologically is doomed to fail. We know from history that forcing people to think something they don’t want to causes oppression, resentment, and leads to upheaval. We need to invest more in education so that ordinary people can recognize lies, and we need character in our leaders so that they hold bad actors accountable.
Yes, the determined will always find a way to socialize with only like-minded people, but tech companies don't have to optimize for it. They could sacrifice some ad-revenue by optimizing for diverse thought, not echo chambers. And that would be a hell of a lot more aminable to free speech than picking and choosing what opinions belong on their platforms.
that is my attempt at HN "argument by analogy"
Give better weapons to warring tribes and watch what happens.
Similarly, implement likes and upvotes, and use ML recommenders to push people into echo chambers, and watch what happens.
Europe != the ethical measuring stick for the rest of the world.
Only by far-right nutcases.
> in most other developed countries he'd be considered center-right, or center at the minimum
I read this frequently here, but when I look at parties considered center-right I don't see much alignment with even the conservative wing of the Democratic Party. For instance, I do not think Angela Merkel and Joe Biden are roughly equivalent in positions; I think Merkel is measurably to the right.
The only people who object to the judgment that the election was free and fair are people who aim to disrupt democracy, and they deserve a slap in the face.
Edit: spelling
In fact, most of the "outrage" experienced on the right is intentionally drummed up, based on almost nothing, for purely selfish reasons. Consider the constantly inflamed talking heads on right-wing media outlets, who abide by the simple rule to always, always be angry.
And that falsehood is being perpetuated by the president and some republicans.
That is very serious, it is one of the main causes of the capitol events and the reason it’s so insidious is the fact that it is false.
There is really no way to emphasise enough that the election was proper and claims otherwise are false, as has been repeatedly shown in courts, even with republican appointed judges.
The capitol riot was not the logical consequence of a group of rational people protesting an illegitimate election foisted by a tyrannical regime. It was, instead, an outpouring of irrational emotion, draped in the language of revolution against tyranny.
Bezos, Suckerburg along with all the others worth 10's of billions will be just fine. It's the little guy that is going to get crushed. Anyway, this is all just a distraction to keep you stupid, tired and poor.
Not compensating hosts for bookings they might be missing out on for a week, if they did not yet have any bookings.
I'm really disappointed in big tech companies, and used to be quite a supporter. I think remainder of my career I'll stick with SMBs.
"I used to support big tech, but no longer"? Who champions big tech? How is an AirBnB decision where they reimburse people for a change in plans "evil"? How aren't the gajillion things Apple and Google and Facebook and Amazon have done not the thing that set you off?
You're downvoted for being antagonistic and non-sensical, not because of some oppressed viewpoint that you didn't even express.
A Trump coup would be a financial disaster for BigTech, for reasons that should be obvious.
Edit: What's controversial about this? This is literally stating what the protestors think.
I'd love to read the details because that's not "debunking" but outright "disproving" which would be immensely useful.
I'm still hoping to find cases that went into discovery and the evidence (not just allegations) were torn apart and evaluated. So far I've only found lack of standing and latches so not particularly helpful.
If nothing else, it shows the incoming politician that they do not have the support of a large number of their constituents and therefor have no claim to a mandate.
Protests of discontent against duly elected politicians serve to remind that politician of the people's will, which the politician is supposed to represent during his time in office. Also, since politicians are usually concerned with reelection, protests show them a demographic that they might have to satisfy somehow in order to secure that reelection.
Sure, people coming out to protest Biden’s inauguration are likely to be an extremist fringe and there is little that a Biden administration could do to immediately satisfy them. But the fact that large numbers of citizens can come together to voice any idea peacefully, no matter how weird, has historically been concerned a good thing in the West.
"Although there’s no widespread evidence of election fraud, fully 72 percent of Republicans say they don’t trust the presidential election results."[0] That article was from December, so things may have changed since. But it's clear that something is seriously wrong when the distrust numbers are that large.
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/22/do-republ...
What isn't a right though is violent insurrection, sedition, and storming government buildings. Preventing that, when it's been discussed and planned in the open, and threatens our democracy, seems very prudent.
And why do people expect them to be insufficient for keeping the trumpers at bay?
And what would have happened back then with no fences? The fences were a block back from the street, and I was inside them. Most likely there would have been a much larger visible protesting crowd along the route, and probably less conflict because people couldn't get in in time. I completely understand the metal detectors that were there, but I really doubt the chances of someone taking a shot back then are even 1/100th of the chances someone would next week.
They have also lost the presumption of good faith. Lots of things start to suck when people just start assuming that you'll up and try to kill someone if you're allowed into the area. Triply so if they keep saying that that's exactly what they want to do.
Or shorter "actions have consequences".
This is a weird year. The Trump-supporters who attacked the capitol are completely indefensible and should obviously be arrested and incarcerated, but all of these extrajudicial actions from companies which are extremely hypocritical compared to their response to antifa makes me uncomfortable.
All I see is bad responses to bad people doing bad things leading to more bad people doing more bad things in response to the responses. I guess I'll hope things get less "us vs them" in a few months.
this is a much larger phenomenon, where millions of middle class people are endorsing or joining militias in political violence at a national level.
The fact that DC officials would allow anyone to visit is irresponsible at best and criminal at worst.