Introducing the Airbnb Citizen

Chapter 2 introduced some of the rhetorical claims made by platform businesses and their allies, and explored the way in which platforms and change are presented in public debates. Chapter 3 reviewed the literature on processes and trajectories of struggle around regulation, showing commonalities across a range of different platforms worldwide, especially in the tactics used by platforms. Analysis of platform regulation regularly notes the combination of rhetorical tactics with the mobilisation of users and allies. Chapter 4 explored the forms through which narratives and mobilisation are combined through users and allies of platform who help platforms pursue political claims beneficial to platforms around regulation and legitimacy, identifying four approaches. This chapter explores the combination of rhetoric and mobilisation, and the different forms of platform power, deployed in the most well-resourced example of platform-based corporate grassroots lobbying in the world to date, Airbnb Citizen.

The chapter has two main sections. First it discusses the creation of the Airbnb Citizen – the core ways in which Airbnb displaces itself by claiming to represent a community, while training a carefully constructed community to represent the business. It does this by exploring how prospective landlord activists are selected, and the processes through which they are subsequently recruited, trained and mobilised. It finds that participation in Airbnb's political campaigns and the composition of Home Sharing Clubs is carefully curated, with commercial landlords on the platform, the most controversial and accounting for a majority of listings, excluded, apparently in order to present a more benign impression of the company. These findings contrast with Airbnb's public account of the composition of Airbnb's campaigns, which suggested an organic and highly diverse ‘community’ movement of Airbnb stakeholders. The findings also illustrate the backstage processes of recruitment, political training, mobilisation and coordination that underpin some of the successes that lean platforms have enjoyed in navigating the regulatory landscape.

The second part of the chapter looks at the activists and mobilisations organised in front groups known as ‘Host Clubs’ or ‘Home Sharing Clubs’ (synonymous, generally referred to as Host Clubs hereafter), and enquires about the relationship these activists, campaigns and groups have with the company.