Lauren Southern Vindicated by Whistleblower: Airbnb Ban Was Political
A whistleblower lamenting Airbnb’s 2023 backflip after blacklisting Lauren Southern’s parents says the ban was intentional.
The NBC exclusive explained the vacation rental property company’s move against Southern’s relatives was part of Big Tech doubling down on “hate groups”.
The whistleblower, former Airbnb “trust and safety” contractor, terrorism research analyst Jess Hernandez, said,
“The removal was an intentional part of policy allowing for bans of people with connections to far-right activists.”
Hernandez told NBC that she was risking her life by breaking cover, implying that doing so would save lives.
So Scary
The former “right-wing watcher” accused Airbnb of abandoning trust and safety.
They were, she adds, placating [right-wing] “partisan media coverage” furious about Airbnb’s “guilty by association” attack on Southern’s parents.
Describing Airbnb’s decision to dissolve its “hate group” monitoring bureaucracy, as putting lives at risk, Hernadez said,
“It’s scary to have information, and to have it fall on deaf ears.
“I’m very concerned. I wouldn’t want my family or my friends staying at an Airbnb.”
Whistleblower Aid, a non-profit with links to eBay/PayPal billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund Inc., is handling the case.
Resting solely on Hernandez’s “firsthand account”, WA released a statement on Tuesday, also accusing Airbnb of “deceiving its customers and shareholders by continuing to publicly tout their policy and commitment to safety while internally abandoning it.”
Defending Hernandez, WA claimed,
“AirBnB had undermined her work of removing individuals affiliated with dangerous and extremist organizations from the platform.”
By cancelling its cancel culture department, Airbnb had cancelled “its public commitment to its hosts” and guests’ safety and security.
By walking back its policy of policing political groups and personalities – seemingly all right-wing – WA said that Airbnb was “exposing customers to individuals affiliated with violent hate groups.”
Whistleblower Aid’s CEO Libby Liu called for the Biden administration to investigate, saying Airbnb’s dismissal of Hernandez was “shortsighted, dangerous and failed to fight extremism.”
“Airbnb,” she said, “was putting profit before safety.”
🚨 Whistleblower reveals @Airbnb quietly dismantled its efforts to remove users affiliated with dangerous organizations in wake of partisan media pressure. Our client is calling for a government investigation. https://t.co/MzUcUaicZt
— Whistleblower Aid (@wbaidlaw) June 19, 2024
Injustice Revealed
The claims vindicate Southern, often misrepresented as a “white nationalist” and “far-right extremist”.
At the time, Airbnb tended to the fallout by backflipping on the ban, stating her parents were cancelled by mistake.
Southern rejected the excuse, telling Tucker Carlson, “something nefarious was going on.”
Whistleblower Aid’s allegations could prove that Southern’s parents were unfairly targeted.
Ironically, Hernandez is admitting to the world that she happily participated in persecuting patrons based on (seemingly left-wing activist) perceptions about a person’s political views.
Hernandez, appearing angry about losing the power to do so, illustrates the dangers of arbitrarily defined terms like “hate groups” and “hate speech” legislation (I recently unpacked more on that here).
Airbnb banned Southern in 2019 by way of the same reckless “guilt by association and appearances” standards that Hernandez is defending.
Responding to it all, Lauren told Caldron Pool,
“I hope no one ever treats these Airbnb activists’ families the way they’ve treated mine.
“I hope every single one of them feels the crushing weight of their decisions as these corporations drop them one by one because the ideologies they sold their soul for are no longer lucrative.
“I hope the authoritarianism and silencing they foster fails so horrendously, they’re left maddened by their perverse power fantasies never coming to fruition,” she added.
Some background on Whistleblower Aid:
They were crowdfunded to the tune of USD $285,000 in 2019.
This supported the Democrats’ attempt to discredit Donald Trump via an impeachment show trial during an election year.
To recap: an alleged whistleblower from within the United States intelligence community, claimed Trump was interfering in the 2020 election.
Trump had allegedly called on the Ukraine president to investigate “Joe Biden, his son Hunter, and Ukraine’s purported role in the 2016 elections.”
___
Republished with thanks to Caldron Pool.
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