Online vigilantism forces Yelp into walking a fine line.
Yelp: Forum is balancing free speech, political ire
Angry comments about racism now swamp the Yelp page for the Philadelphia Starbucks that had two black men arrested. Across its top are splashed historic photos of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists being dragged away by police from whites-only restaurants, juxtaposed against cell phone images and videos of the current-day men being handcuffed.
The Starbucks incident rekindled attention to Berkeley’s Elmwood Cafe, which shooed away black comedian W. Kamau Bell in 2015. That, too, incited numerous disparaging Yelp reviews this week accusing it of racial profiling. The cafe
abruptly closed early Friday and shuttered its website and social media accounts.
Outraged by reports of businesses behaving badly, netizens often take to Yelp to express their disgust with a tidal wave of one-star ratings and negative reviews. It’s a perfect forum in a way: They can use Yelp as a megaphone to directly hurt a company’s bottom line by deterring future customers. But for San Francisco’s Yelp, the online vigilantism forces it to walk a tricky line in maintaining the integrity of its reviews without appearing to squelch free speech.
“Our goal is to be transparent with the actions we take to protect the quality of content on our site, preserve consumers’ freedom of speech, and shield businesses from online harassment,” wrote Yelp vice president Shannon Eis in a 2016 blog post. “These media storms are complicated situations that create a dilemma for Yelp, but we’ve chosen to take a strong and consistent stance on managing them and the content they create.”
Yelp flags controversial businesses that have drawn activists’ ire with a red-outlined box called “Active Cleanup Alert,” which says that its policy is “to remove both positive and negative posts that appear to be motivated more by the news coverage itself than the reviewer’s personal consumer experience with the business.” The box explains that Yelp will soon scrub non-customer reviews from the targeted pages, and suggests that people instead post thoughts on Yelp Talk, its open discussion forum.
Yelp revenge has become part of the narrative for high-profile hullabaloos. The Minnesota dentist who killed Cecil the lion, bakeries that refuse to make cakes for gay weddings, and a Dublin, Ireland, cafe that required a doctor’s note for glutenfree requests all were inundated by indignant reviewers — most of whom had never patronized those businesses.
First Amendment experts said Yelp is justified in its approach.
“For Yelp to help consumers make better choices in the marketplace, it’s completely legitimate to limit feedback to people who actually engaged with the vendors,” said Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. “It wants consumers to talk about their personal experience with a business. Political protests don’t answer those questions.”
Likewise, Liz Woolery, senior policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology, which works to protect civil liberties in the digital age, said Yelp appears to be striking a good balance.
“They are being transparent about what they are doing, telling Yelp users what’s happening and even giving a timeline for when reviews might come down,” she said. “They are not getting involved in whether they agree with the speech at issue, just saying the platform is for firsthand user reviews, and content that doesn’t meet that criteria will have to come down. They are doing that in the interest of keeping Yelp’s purpose and character true.”
Yelp isn’t the only site that has to struggle with this issue. Wikipedia entries and Amazon reviews at times have been taken over by people using them for social commentary or ribald humor.
But, experts said, online activists have multiple channels to express themselves. Facebook, Twitter, Nextdoor and the whole range of social media all welcome people to express diverse viewpoints.
“If Yelp didn’t intervene, it would get many comments that are illinformed at best,” Goldman said. “That might overwhelm experiences from actual consumers. If you have 100 reviews from actual consumers and 1 million from angry people who never engaged with the business, it makes it impossible to get a full picture. That’s a bad user experience.”