The New Start-Ups Confronting Alleged Racism on Airbnb
While Airbnb has been hailed as a platform to revolutionize travel and bring people together, they have only recently begun to address what some users have been complaining about for years: persistent racism. The hashtag #AirbnbWhileBlack has taken off, and many users have been sharing stories of being discriminated against because of their name and profile photo. Rohan Gilkes, who had that experience when trying to book a room in Idaho, is the co-creator of noirebnb.com, a room-rental site that aims to bring inclusiveness to this service. Dan Svirsky, doctoral student at Harvard Business School and co-author of the paper “Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy” is also part of the team that built “Debias Yourself”- a Chrome plugin aimed to take the bias out of Airbnb listings.
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