Figuring out the Tech Solutions to Airbnb's Racial Discrimination Problem

Airbnb is facing a lot of challenges these days, whether they be regulatory clampdowns in major cities like New York City and Berlin to the growing awareness of the potentially discriminatory pitfalls of its peer-to-peer platform. The latter has spawned an entire movement (just search for the hashtag #AirbnbWhileBlack on Twitter), given birth to a class-action lawsuit, and has spurred other entrepreneurs to launch their own versions of Airbnb that cater more to specific communities. Recent concerns about racist, discriminatory behavior from Airbnb's hosts were also serious enough to prompt Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky to address them directly at Airbnb's annual OpenAir tech conference in San Francisco on June 8. Opening the conference, Chesky said, "There's been a lot of news about prejudice and bias on our platform, and this is a huge issue for us." He added, "We have zero tolerance for it and we will take swift action." Chesky also pledged to work on resolving these issues, and asked for the tech community's help in coming up with solutions. "In the next months, we will be revisiting the design of our site from end to end to see how we can create a more inclusive platform. We're open to ideas. It's a really, really hard problem and we need help solving it. We want to move this forward. I myself have engaged with people who have been victims of discrimination on the platform. We take this seriously," he said. In a recent New York Times article, the company also said it would be making an announcement about its preliminary efforts to address discrimination on its site within the next week, and that it plans to debut a full report with solutions by September. This isn't the first time Airbnb has had to address issues of discrimination, bias, or prejudice on its site, however. As far back as 2014, researchers at Harvard Business School noted the possibility of racial discrimination against hosts by guests using the platform. Their study found that hosts who were not African American could charge 12 percent more, on average, with everything else being equal. More recently, those same researchers discovered that Airbnb guests who had African American-sounding names had a much more difficult time being approved by hosts for reservations than those guests with more white-sounding names, even when all of their other information and messaging was exactly the same. For one of the Harvard Business School researchers, Ben Edelman, Airbnb CEO Brian