You also don't need a social account to login, so how would Airbnb even know that user named "John Smith" on Twitter is you?
Many of them collect their data via third-party scripts so you should ensure those are blocked.
Effectively, you can't.
OP was still able to use Airbnb, they just removed one positive review possibly because they have no online history making it hard to distinguish them from a bot or puppet.
> Since when is a social media account required to leave reviews?
It's just as absurd when written this way. But, please, show me the exact place where Airbnb (or any other big company) says that a social media presence is required to leave a review. I'm waiting.
Edit: furthermore spam prevention takes all sorts of random signals in to account. Having no online presence other than a single stay in Airbnb certainly looks suspicious.
Nobody writes their spam detection algorithm as policy.
Huh? Airbnb has the entire transaction history that matters – proving that this specific user paid a specific amount of money for staying in a specific place for a specific amount of time.
Thinking that you need to prove "online history" (how would you even track this?) as well is absurd.
My theory on this is the same as usual – Airbnb outsources or understaffs their customer service department as usual; some stressed out agent closed the case without even looking at it. Making some noise and opening a separate case will probably work if you're bothered enough.
After that, they’ve already made the fees on the stay. Most people won’t be losing 20% or whatever to farm good reviews.
Why would the final and optional review step be the part where they decide to verify if the stranger staying in someone else’s house is a real person.
Implying that a "bot" or "puppet" is paying to stay at AirBnB's just so they can write salty reviews?
It is not really a big cost because you only really need to pay the platform fee (you control both sides of the transaction do the only real cost is the middleman).
Reviews are super important and it is hard to get booking when you have 0 reviews so it is not surprising that some hosts would spend some dollars for 3-4 fake positive reviews to kickstart their property (many people will bounce off the ad without at least a couple positive reviews, so it changes your business radically)
