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Airbnb has targeted council employees with online adverts. Does that count as lobbying?


“Just because it’s digital, and not over coffee, doesn’t mean it’s not,” says Niamh Kirk, an associate professor at the University of Limerick.

When Green Party Councillor Feljin Jose – who represents an area of north inner-city Dublin – saw an advert on his LinkedIn feed for Airbnb’s Rural Tourism Fund, earlier this month he kinda wondered why, he says. In their paper, the subject of the news report, ESRI’s researchers had said that they didn’t find a link between the rise of short-term lets and the fall in registered tenancies. At the moment, under the , digital services which are designated as “Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines” have had to create their own ad libraries for greater transparency around who is pushing what.

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