Story at a glance:
- Yelp unveiled two new features that help local businesses identify restaurants with a fully vaccinated staff, as well as provide protection against review bombers, which is the act of negatively scoring something not based on experience or merit.
- Review bombing has been a trending cyber attack amongst trolls, some of whom have a penchant of railing against social change, targeting upcoming movies or video games.
- Similar safeguards and features have already been implemented when the application attributed Black-owned, Latinx-owned, Asian-owned and LGBTQ+-owned filters in June 2020.
Yelp unveiled two new features that help identify restaurants whose staff is fully vaccinated, as well as provide protection against review bombers, the act of negatively scoring something not based on experience or merit.
Yelp told Changing America that it will now create attributes for restaurants who want to show customers that they are complying with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance as the nation struggles to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing spread of the delta variant.
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“To help consumers understand how a business is currently operating as pandemic guidelines continue to evolve, today, Yelp is announcing two new, free attributes—’Proof of vaccination required’ and ‘All staff fully vaccinated,'” Yelp posted.
“To help protect businesses that may experience backlash for their vaccination policies, we are proactively monitoring Yelp pages of businesses that activate these attributes,” the release said. “This is one of the significant measures Yelp takes to maintain the integrity and quality of the content on our platform.”
Review bombing has been a trending cyber attack amongst trolls, some of whom have a penchant for railing against social change, targeting upcoming movies or video games.
However, Yelp will enforce a new guideline that prohibits reviewers who specifically target businesses based on their COVID-19 policies from posting.
Yelp said nearly 8,000 reported reviews in 2021 have been removed for violating their special COVID-19 Content Guidelines.
“Reviews from customers that criticize a business’s vaccination requirements violate our special COVID Content Guidelines, which were introduced in March 2020 to protect businesses from reputational harm related to the pandemic,” Yelp wrote.
Similar safeguards and features have already been implemented when the application attributed Black-owned, Latinx-owned, Asian-owned and LGBTQ-owned filters in June 2020.
Yelp removed nearly 400 reviews of “hateful, racist or other harmful content” directed towards businesses.
“Unusual Activity Alerts” are placed on business profiles that gain a significant amount of visits and reviews for their COVID-19 stances. More than 100 of these alerts allowed moderators to flag Yelp pages and remove roughly 4,500 reviews in violation of the site’s guidelines since January, according to Yelp.
“If warranted, our team of moderators will investigate and may temporarily disable the ability to post as we place an alert over the business’s reviews,” the company stated. “After activity on the business page has dramatically decreased or stopped, we will clean up the page so only first-hand consumer experiences are reflected.”
Business profiles are temporarily disabled from receiving new reviews, which could last between a few days and several weeks, according to Yelp.
“We’ve long invested in mitigating misinformation on our platform, to give consumers access to trusted content while helping businesses focus on what they do best: provide a great customer experience,” Yelp wrote.
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