Techies protest on GitHub as Airbnb’s antisemitism crisis continues (from medium)

After Airbnb's controversial ban on Jewish listings in the disputed West Bank, many around the world took steps to boycott the Silicon Valley unicorn. Just last week Beverly Hills City Council called for a boycott of Airbnb.

This time, frustrated with Airbnb's deafening silence, techies took to GitHub to protest. "Airbnb is antisemitic blacklist" takes an unorthodox approach to making a political statement. The GitHub project is simply an ad-block list featuring Airbnb-related domains, effectively allowing you to easily block access to Airbnb from your electronic device.

While many might say this is an overreaction, as Hippocrates might have said, "Desperate times call for desperate measures". The ban certainly came as a surprise to everybody regardless of political leanings. A twitter user has joked that perhaps one of the founder's Polish ancestry is to blame, a notion quickly rebuked by others.

While David Harsanyi wrote about Airbnb's blog post in the New York Post:

sounds like it was written by some poli-sci freshman who just wrapped up his first Chomsky tome

The drama is underlined by the waning era of tech exceptionalism. As Steven Johnson's seminal Wired piece The Political Education of Silicon Valley explains, the tech industry no longer exists in a world of it's own. It can't escape the political.

If Airbnb remains unwavering - will other major Silicon Valley players follow?

This is reposted verbatim from medium, all credit goes to the author. Hoping Steemians can help out!