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Restaurant review app Yelp will slap warning labels on businesses accused of racist behavior.
Yelp will apply the labels when “there’s resounding evidence of egregious, racist actions from a business owner or employee,” the company announced in a blog post.
The key word is “resounding.” Yelp is indicating that when a business gets thorough media coverage for a racist act, a label that links to a news article from a credible press outlet explaining the incident will be applied.
“As the nation reckons with issues of systemic racism, we’ve seen in the last few months that there is a clear need to warn consumers about businesses associated with egregious, racially charged actions to help people make more informed spending decisions,” Noorie Malik, VP of user operations, wrote in the blog post.
The company points out Yelp users are usually the first to take action when a restaurant or shop is accused of a racist act. They’ll then flood the business’s page with bad reviews, even though they did not experience the racism firsthand.
Yelp has a strict policy against fake reviews. So the company’s previous stance was to simply place a general alert on the business’s page notifying consumers about the uptick in negative reviews that didn’t necessarily come from firsthand experience.
However, Yelps says the number of businesses involved in alleged racist incidents has soared in the recent months. “So far in 2020, we’ve seen a 133 percent increase in the number of media-fueled incidences on Yelp compared to the same time last year,” Malik said. “Between May 26 and September 30, we placed more than 450 alerts on business pages that were either accused of, or the target of, racist behavior related to the Black Lives Matter movement.”
The surge in reviews about racist incidents has prompted Yelp to come up with the new alert. When an incident occurs, the company will first issue a general notice informing consumers that “someone associated with the business was accused of, or the target of, racist behavior.” If wrongdoing is found, Yelp will then escalate to the stronger “Business Accused of Racist Behavior” alert.
“Before issuing one of these alerts, we do a thorough investigation to confirm that it is warranted,” Yelp says in a separate support page.
However, the company didn’t mention how it’ll handle when a business or its employees are falsely accused of racism and hate in the press, which has occurred before. Nor does the blog post mention what business owners can do to get the alert taken down.
Yelp’s Malik simply said: “We have maintained around-the-clock support over the last few months to ensure that we’re maintaining the trust and safety of our users and business owners.”
