Is it true that Polish hotels now have an option “no Ukrainians”?

In March 2023, information spread across the Internet that in Poland it had become possible to book a room in a hotel where there were guaranteed to be no Ukrainians among its guests. We checked whether such xenophobic practices really appeared in the country.

As the TV channel reported on March 12Constantinople", Ukrainian refugees in Poland accuse local citizens of "another round of Ukrainophobia." According to the TV channel, online hotel booking services in Poland now have a “no Ukrainians” option among their filters. This allegedly reflected the reluctance of Poles to live in establishments where Ukrainian refugees were staying.

Previously, the same information spread on social networks, and there it was accompanied screenshot from the proposed hotel booking service. In Telegram, in particular, the channels “Ne.Sugar"(582,000 views at the time of writing the analysis), "The world of Mikhail Onufrienko"(321,000), "First People's"(166,000), "Sheikh Tamir" (146,000), "Uncle Slava", (126,000), "Ostashko! Important"(122,000), "Reports by Yuri Podolyaki"(121,000), "Belarusian security officer"(119,000), "Cat Kostyan"(106,000), "Cartridge"(102,000), "World News"(102,000), Putin TG Team (84,000), "What's going on?" (67,000) "Sledgehammer 18+" (60,000) and "Well done Sagittarius"(56,000).

By data According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, as of March 20, 2023, 8.1 million people in Europe were registered as having fled Ukraine after the start of the full-scale Russian invasion. More than 1.5 million of them have received temporary asylum in neighboring Poland, on whose border the country has eight land crossings. checkpoints. Some of these people posted in Polish hotels, and part of the costs of their maintenance were borne by local governments and the hotels themselves. From March 1, 2023, many refugees whose stay in collective accommodation centers exceeded 120 days, according to the new law should cover a certain share of the corresponding costs.

On the left side of the screenshot that has been shared, we see information about four hotel-type enterprises:

These are not dry technical descriptions - each text is of an advertising nature and, judging by Google search results, is unique. All objects are characterized in this way on one And volume same website - hotel aggregator nocleg24h.pl. In the section "Advertisements"On this resource you can see the same interface with options as in the viral screenshot:

However, there is one difference. If in a popular picture between the filters Parking (“parking”) and Plac zabaw dla dzieci (“children’s playground”) there is the same option Bez Ukraińców (“without Ukrainians”), then on the site in this place there is a filter Piaskownica (“sandbox”). This arrangement of filters is logical, if only because it corresponds to alphabetical order, which cannot be said about the Bez Ukraińców option, which is clearly wedged in at the wrong address. With a high probability we can say that this item was added to the screenshot through a graphic editor or by editing the code of a page of the original site saved to the computer (we have already discussed such methods told). There is no such option in the rest of the site either. It’s not even on the pages others popular Polish aggregators hotels.

Neither the Polish nor the Ukrainian media space raised the issue of an obviously discriminatory filter on a hotel aggregator website, and a scandal if such an item was on the menu would be difficult to avoid. But there were many publications on the Russian-language Internet, and apparently the first of them appeared there. We found the earliest mention of a strange filter complete with a screenshot thanks to the TGStat service in the Telegram channel “Guard", where the corresponding post was posted on March 8 at 18:13 Moscow time. All of the above suggests that we are dealing with a fake image created based on the interface of a real website.

In conclusion, we would like to add that just two days after the screenshot appeared, a scandal on a similar topic erupted in Russia itself - it is indicative of how local media covered it and commented on newsmakers in comparison with the reaction of the Ukrainian media to the fabricated news from Poland. March 10 Telegram channel «Dostoverkin“discovered that in the application of the popular Aviasales service, hotels abroad can be filtered by the approximate number of Russian-speaking guests. Your indignation about this expressed State Duma deputies Vitaly Milonov and Sultan Khamzaev (the latter even threatened to go to the prosecutor's office). In response, the Aviasales press service stated that this option was added for the convenience of travelers who face a language barrier while vacationing abroad. Representatives of the company noted that filters that customize search results to the user’s language have long existed in the Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Thai, Korean, Chinese, Japanese and, in fact, Russian versions of the service. Some resources they even reported news about Polish hotels and Aviasales together, although only one of the two facts ultimately turned out to be real.

Cover photo: social networks

Fake

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