smosa/unfairbnb
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/how-they-justify-deleting-bad-reviews
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# how-they-justify-deleting-bad-reviews

Here's a review policy from a particular gig hosting website. Below are the highlights (as retrieved on November 27, 2021).

- Bias (Reviewing your own listing, reviewing as a competitor)
- Incentivizing or threatening a potential review for a desired outcome from the host.
- Violating a separate policy about parties and events.1
- Relevance, this also includes commentary about someone's religious, political, etc views and their assumptions of their character.

If the company cannot find a category in the above list to remove a review that might keep someone from booking, these lists may also reference a separate content policy (example) with vague rules that can be applied to virtually any situation.

- Advertising, spam, impersonation.
- Discrimination and Promoting illegal, harmful, sexually explicit, etc activities.2
- Violating someone's privacy, entity, or property rights including listing the property address.
- Reviews that are biased
- Reviews that are not relevant3

Simply put, the company controls all parts of the equation except the hosting experience itself. The policing of the rules are guided by the interpretation of the company alone. They also control which reviews potential guests get to see before putting their money down. They are the Judge, jury, and executioner. They profit from keeping as many hosts online and his table and are incapable of being impartial by design. This is why the gig websites are especially unsafe versus a hotel.

1. We have seen accounts of guests saying they were accused of these violations by hosts while the gig company simply took the side of the host. In one example, a group of black guests were referred to as "monkeys" on video while being accused of violating the company's party rule.

- Multiple sex workers have reported disciplinary action against them as guests only because of their chosen profession. It turns out some companies use AI to target sex workers.

- In one policy, the language reads, "Reviews that contain mostly irrelevant information are also subject to removal, but only where the otherwise relevant information would not be expected to meaningfully inform the booking decisions of other community members" yet we have observed reviews warning women about unsafe male hosts removed with a citation to this clause about lack of relevancy.

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