That is easily the silliest thing I've heard about this so far, and this is after reading AirBnB's PR statement.

If they fuck this up, they won't "come out stronger", they'll come out with a sufficiently heavy PR backlash that people won't use them anymore. And that'll be that. As it stands now, the only thing people are hearing are negative things about AirBnB, and unless they take huge steps to fix that, there's going to be a lot of people who won't touch them with a 10 foot pole.