Anti-vaxxers are weaponizing Yelp to punish bars that require vaccine proof

Smith’s Yelp reviews were shut down after the sudden flurry of activity on its page, which the company labels “unusual activity alerts,” a stopgap measure for both the business and Yelp to filter through a flood of reviews and pick out which are spam and which aren’t. 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. “After we’ve seen activity dramatically decrease or stop, we will then clean up the page so that only firsthand consumer experiences are reflected,” she said in a statement.

It’s a practice that Yelp has had to deploy more often over the course of the pandemic: According to Yelp’s 2020 Trust & Safety Report, the company saw a 206% increase over 2019 levels in unusual activity alerts. “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.

Spamming a business with one-star reviews is not a new tactic. In fact, perhaps the best-known case is Colorado’s Masterpiece bakery, which won a 2018 Supreme Court battle for refusing to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, after which it got pummeled by one-star reviews. “People are still writing fake reviews. People will always write fake reviews,” Liu says.

But he adds that today’s online audience know that platforms use algorithms to detect and flag problematic words, so bad actors can mask their grievances by blaming poor restaurant service like a more typical negative review to ensure the rating stays up — and counts.

That seems to have been the case with Knapp’s bar. His Yelp review included comments like “There was hair in my food” or alleged cockroach sightings. “Really ridiculous, fantastic shit,” Knapp says. “If you looked at previous reviews, you would understand immediately that this doesn’t make sense.” 

Liu also says there is a limit to how much Yelp can improve their spam detection, since natural language — or the way we speak, read, and write — “is very tough for computer systems to detect.” 

But Liu doesn’t think putting a human being in charge of figuring out which reviews are spam or not will solve the problem. “Human beings can’t do it,” he says. “Some people might get it right, some people might get it wrong. I have fake reviews on my webpage and even I can’t tell which are real or not.”

You might notice that I’ve only mentioned Yelp reviews thus far, despite the fact that Google reviews — which appear in the business description box on the right side of the Google search results page under “reviews” — is arguably more influential. That’s because Google’s review operations are, frankly, even more mysterious. 

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. “You would think Google would say, ‘Something is fucked up here,’” Knapp says. “These are IP addresses from overseas. It really undermines the review platform when things like this are allowed to happen.”