Airbnb removed a review of a racist host because it was “defamatory”

The following review of a Moira from Edinburgh (www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/7943693) was removed because it was supposedly “defamatory”. I personally think that this was an easy target as the way in which my host behaved, especially towards the end of my visit, was so horrendous that is was simply impossible for my review not to be “defamatory”. “Moira is a manipulative and cretinous racist. She essentially uses Airbnb as a recruitment agency, pestering her English-speaking guests into taking low-level positions at her place of work (no doubt so that she can keep the referral fee she would receive as a reward) and behaving like a sullen child when this inevitably backfires. To be fair, she’s a lovely host at first…right up until it becomes blindingly obvious that you would rather starve to death than work for a place that could hire someone as vapid as herself. After that, she drops the charade and shows herself to be the white supremacist fraud that she really is. None of the rooms in her house – not even the bathroom – have functional locks on the doors so guests may have to put up with her insipid “conversation” for the first few days. I eventually had to prop my suitcase against the door just to avoid her (something that she rather bizarrely interpreted as me “slamming” the door). Due to her ignorance and poor comprehension, she has a tendency to lose her temper during discussions she doesn’t understand. Moira smokes in the house (yet has the hypocrisy to complain about the phantom smells her guests have supposedly brought in) and has developed an irritating habit of switching off the Wi-Fi late at night (and sometimes just for the attention). When I calmly asked her to switch it back on one night, she used this as an opportunity to follow me back into my room and start yelling about a rift that her own childishness and poor judgment had caused earlier that day. Perplexingly, she later told Airbnb Customer Services that *she* didn’t feel safe in her flat. Apparently in Moira’s world, a white woman barging into a guest’s room and yelling at night is perfectly fine but a black woman knocking on the door and waiting for a response is an act of aggression. It’s also worth noting that the flat itself is in the middle of nowhere, has really weak plumbing/ventilation and walls so thin that I could frequently hear her neighbours from my room. Her tom cat is (unsurprisingly) quite violent as well but usually just with other cats. Usually. Long story short, if you aren’t black, aren’t *that* fluent in English or are just willing to go along with every ridiculous notion that pops into this woman’s head, then Moira’s house is certainly better than a crowded hostel. Otherwise, you may want to stay somewhere else.”

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