Airbnb has stood accused of using AI to detect whether a person is a sex worker, mentally ill, has a criminal record, or what they deem undesirable.

Dr. Elissa M. Redmiles (@eredmil1), a visiting scholar at Harvard, has been looking into the practices of Airbnb.

Multiple sex workers we interviewed in Europe (Germany/Switzerland) reported this problem extensively, even though sex work is not illegal behavior. This is a classic case, as many workers discussed, of Americanized-tech damagingly applying our “ethics” to the rest of the world. Our interview data further confirms the prevalence of this practice internationally, which denies legal sex workers, among other groups determined undesirable by AI, from participating in a large and fast growing part of the gig economy, when they are gig workers themselves!

According to a story in Rolling Stone, “Airbnb owns an algorithm that can scrub their platform of those who are deemed “untrustworthy” — and sex workers, for one, say this is just the latest instance of discrimination against them.”

But it’s not just sex workers that AirBNB is targeting. Bethany Hallam has a charge of possession from 9 years ago, and that got her banned from their platform. Here is a copy of the email they sent her.

I looked into this company, inflection risk solutions, and it turns out that they use AI to analyze billions of public records, including social media, and then use that information to warn companies like Airbnb that they are a “high risk” and shouldn’t use their platform.

Yet the problem with AI is that it has a lot of false positives. And it also doesn’t account for unusual situations. For example, what if you got picked up on a possession charge a decade ago because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time – at a high school party, say, where friends were using, but you weren’t? It’s been ten years now, and you don’t do drugs, have no further problems with the law, and not even so much as a traffic ticket. By all accounts, you’re a perfect citizen who is a soccer mom on the PTA.

Because of that incident ten years ago, where you had just turned 18 so, your record wasn’t sealed, but you didn’t even do the drugs that were at the party. You are deemed a bad risk, according to Airbnb.

What if when you were 14, you were kidnapped, sold into sex slavery, and at 19, while still under the control of your kidnappers, you get arrested in a prostitution sting? You are a victim of human trafficking. You were able to use that arrest to get help from the authorities, get free from your kidnappers, and start a new life. You get your GED and go on to community college for two years, which gets you a scholarship to go to UCLA, where you get a master’s degree in accounting. You become a CPA.

Now you get married and have your first daughter. You and your husband decide to rent an Airbnb on vacation, so you set up an account. Only to find out a few weeks later, your account was banned because you are a high risk due to your arrest for prostitution back when you were a victim of human trafficking.

There are just some of the many stories out there about AirBNB’s policies. Sex workers are banned from having an account just because they are sex workers. Even if they just want to rent a place for their own personal pleasure. It doesn’t matter. Because they are porn stars, Airbnb doesn’t allow them to use their services.

“One major barrier the sex worker rights movement has is that occupation is not a protected category for discrimination,” says Sienna Baskin, director of legal services at advocacy group the Sex Workers Project of the Urban Justice Center. “Whereas you can’t be discriminated against under city and state laws for your race, ethnicity, or gender, occupation is not one of those categories. You can be discriminated against based on your occupation.”

And in the end, it comes down to the fact that they are a private company and can basically do whatever they want. It’s not fair, but that’s just how it works.

The only way to force a company like Airbnb to change its policies is to stop giving them our money. And then try and convince your fans to stop giving them their money. Porn stars need to use their platforms – those large followings they have on Instagram and Twitter to take a public stand and try and convince their followers that this isn’t okay and that if they love and support you like they say they do, then they’ll stand with you and stop using companies that hurt you – like Airbnb.

Porn stars have platforms – it’s now time to use it.