Noorie Malik, Yelp’s vice president of user operations, said Yelp has a “team of moderators” that investigate pages that get an unusual amount of traffic.
“Since January 2021, we’ve placed more than 15 unusual activity alerts on business pages related to a business’s stance on covid-19 vaccinations,” said Malik.
The majority of those cases have been since May, like the gay bar C.C. Attles in Seattle, which got an alert from Yelp after it made patrons show proof of vaccination at the door.
Earlier this month, Moe’s Cantina in Chicago’s River North neighborhood got spammed after it attempted to isolate vaccinated customers from unvaccinated ones.
His Yelp review included comments like “There was hair in my food” or alleged cockroach sightings.
While businesses I spoke to said Yelp worked with them on identifying spam reviews, none of them had any luck with contacting Google’s team.
It really undermines the review platform when things like this are allowed to happen. »
