What is "new" is that this is now getting a lot of exposure in the non-tech press, which it wasn't before. Techcrunch is relatively niche compared to FT, and hacker news is even more niche.

What this means for AirBnb is that for a great many readers of FT, if they haven't heard of AirBnB before, will have an opinion that the service is inherently unsafe (even if this is the 0.001% story). And once someone makes up their opinion on a product or service, it is very hard to make them change