Yelp to place “alert” on businesses accused of racism
blog.yelp.com
blog.yelp.com
In a perfect world this is a noble endeavor, but we don’t live in a perfect world and this could just as easily be leveraged by trolls and/or competing businesses.
What’s to stop a person from making a false claim of racist behavior against any person/public figure/politician/businessperson/colleague... they don’t like? The answer is “nothing at all”, and it happens everyday. If you’re particularly unlucky it will be scandalized publicly and appear as a permanent mark on your social credit score.
Yelp is just incorporating our own social norms into their product. If you don’t like it, it’s not their fault.
Yelp’s User Operations team already places alerts
on business pages when we notice an unusual uptick
in reviews that are based on what someone may have
seen in the news or on social media, rather than
on a first-hand experience with the business. Now,
when a business gains public attention for reports
of racist conduct, such as using racist language
or symbols, Yelp will place a new Business Accused
of Racist Behavior Alert on their Yelp page to
inform users, along with a link to a news article
where they can learn more about the incident.I think there was a hit Fleetwood Mac song about that strategy, or maybe it was Marvin Gaye.
Why don't you just be honest and admit the real reason for this contrived change in policy and message was to drive attention towards YELP. It is nothing more than a publicity stunt leveraging the current state of unrest.
From the number of comments on this site, it worked.
This company is what I would call "unhelpful" to stay diplomatic. I think this decision is to increase extortion to buy their ad services.
edit: perhaps they just want to forward accusations:
https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-yelp-phoneix-insiders...
https://youtu.be/-UF1foStzKw (starts at -46 min)
The Yelp reviews are already coming in .... power to the mob!
At some point all these Billions from Tech companies funding increasingly fringe woke ideas, will backfire, when the equity for all mob takes power, and aims directly at the billionaire tech oppressors.
The mock guillotine outside Jeff Bezos home earlier this year, was a taste of things to come.
With such Orwellian newspeak/doublespeak as "Silence is Violence," this is just a taste of the dangerous hyper-normalization to come.
I don't freedom of speech doesn't cover business entities, but libel and defamation does. I don't see how this doesn't open up Yelp to massive litigation.
It’s a feature that says: “rather than letting mobs review-bomb places, we’re going to temporarily block all reviews and just link to the article because that’s the relevant thing”
There’s not going to be an “accuse of racism” button. This feature is “if a business is being publicly accused of racism in a credible newspaper, we’ll note it on the page.” Which is a lot more reasonable, imo.
Does such a thing exist anymore?
The NYT has lost its mind over the 1619 project. If I can trust the NYT to get basic facts of history right who can I trust in media?
Forgive the snark, but the existence of unreasonable organizations does not preclude the existence of reasonable ones. And even unreasonable ones are not incapable of reason. Applies to people within the orgs, too.
Newspapers have retractions. Yelp has an extortion policy to remove bad reviews. And you can bet they won't remove that flag even if there are 30 retractions.
Regardless, CNN doesn’t often cover these stories. Local news does. And local news doesn’t suck.
Btw, please forgive the snark, but a complete lack of faith in local journalism (I.e. a conflation of CNN and the Altoona Mirror) is a big reason cable news has a lot of power.
TLDR - support local journalists!
CNN has bullied redditors to make a public apology and never say anything cnn editors consider racist or else: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/6lcdp9/did_...
>CNN is not publishing "HanAholeSolo's" name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.
>CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.
Almost every single "business accused of racism" story in the media story turns out to be a hoax. (for obvious reasons, being a victim is now the way to societal approval)
Local news covers these accusations, so it doesn't matter whether they're accurate about the fact that there is no actual evidence for a claim, that will still allow Yelp to label the business as "accused of racism".
Thankfully augmented reality hasn’t quite taken off yet. Can you imagine being branded “undesirable” by an unaccountable tech giant, then having facial recognition tech display this mark of witchcraft everywhere you go?
Much how working for woke companies usually leads to a 20% drop in salary because you're getting paid in good feelings.
Can you provide an example? Usually I see the label "woke companies" applied to places like Google and Stripe and Netflix which are also known for their particularly high salaries.
F&G make up a lot of the compensation in stocks so total comp looks great. The benefits in Exxon (and Raytheon) were insane, car, house and international schooling were paid and I ended up in hospital for unrelated reasons and paid $0 on a >$500k bill.
Also yes, in general if you work in a nonprofit for a charitable cause you'll likely make way less money. Google et al are certainly not nonprofits, but they aren't in the "evil" businesses of defense/mass population manipulation either, at least not to the degree that Facebook and Palantir are. They are somewhere in between.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSnTTND0UcM
This is what people consider a reasonable way to show you're not racist.
People want to support businesses that help create the society they expect.
You can criticize, pointedly even, the way that Yelp proposes to enforce this policy; especially in light of their controversial business practices.
But let's not put a blanket condemnation of acknowledging when businesses promote racism, or the desire to patronize other institutions.
This is doubly a problem when words like racist have recently been redefined in ways that are impossible for the average person to keep up with.
Like I said, criticize how they implement it.
But I think it's evident how disingenuous your comparisons are by the examples you've chosen. Witchcraft, communism... neither are provable actions you can "commit". They are thought crimes. Racism is something you commit against a people or persons, is provably true.
Video recording? Easily manipulated.
First-hand accounts? Easily fabricated.
Even then, what exactly are you proving? It is unclear what racism even means to this political faction, as we can tell with white silence is violence and similar slogans. Merely choosing to not repeat a political slogan is characterized as racism.
As always, the proper solution is via actual legal channels and laws against discrimination, not a tech website that brands people. If a business is demonstrably racist, sue them and you’ll win in court. That’s how the legal system works.
It is easy. If you are white, you are racist.
The vast majority of people everywhere agree with this. It's not exactly enlightenment values anymore.
The issue is with people who think that they're morally superior for holding this view while they label everyone else with extremes.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Motorist_Green_Book
The difference in intent, effect and or result is:
The Greenbook was created to provide information on businesses that were not racist, decent people that offered services to minorities. In essence it promoted certain buisnesses to people which helped them, what yelp is doing is placing alerts on buisnesses that you should not visit thus hurting them.
The Smithsonian has a digital copy of the book here: https://transcription.si.edu/project/7955
Hope that answered your question
After contemplating your question overnight, I believe that Yelp's "INTENT" may be nothing more than a kind of virtue signalling, in order to drive attention to their web site. I would imagine that during this time of restaurants and service business shutdowns, they are having a hard time too. So why not stir things up, with some race baiting, heck maybe Fox news will give them a mention!!
So yes it is quite a bit different than the Green Books' creators intent.
This time it is to deflect from criticism against Yelp itself and maybe even increase their extortion efforts towards businesses.
- It will give violent protesters targets to go and harrass or attack
- It will be a beacon for actual racists to congregate
- Who's to stop a disgruntled reviewer from labelling a place as racist?
Just no.
So now Yelp will add a label to businesses accused of this term. Don't buy from racists! In German that translates to Kauft nicht bei Rassisten!.
Here is to hoping this nonsense will end soon and will end well because this -ist/-ism mania has the potential to go down into history as the next incarnation of what drove the Salem Witch trials.
> New Consumer Alert on Yelp Takes Firm Stance Against Racism
The important bit is the alert disables reviews, and posts this message:
> While we understand the desire to warn others about racist behavior associated with a business, all reviews on Yelp must reflect an actual first-hand customer experience. We have temporarily disabled the ability to post here as we work to investigate the content.
This is good for businesses who worry about being falsely accused.
There have been multiple incidents already where different clips or angles of video totally change the narrative.
Will there be an appeal process? How do you clear your name after an accusation has been made? Who's to review the evidence?
Racism-specific alerts are probably going to exacerbate the problem they call "media-driven" reviews and feedback, despite their mitigation efforts.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Motorist_Green_Book
[ Disclaimer, I work for one of these companies on things unrelated to this topic. ]
Their mobile site though, file it alongside Reddit as one that's designed to have the appearance of something functional while really just being a funnel to the app. Yelp's worse about it, in fact.
Yelp has always seemed to me, to be a sort of protection racket for businesses' reputations. Now they are going to flag certain business as possible racists during a time of social unrest? How long will it take before one of these places gets targeted and burned down after a "Peaceful Protest" due to the Yelp warning? In civil law it is a balance of probabilities so wether or not it can be proven 100% that the flag made them a target, Yelp may still be found partially liable in court.
"Were only trying to shut down small businesses because of one person"
Or
"Were so big that we can't fail therefore you must kowtow"
Someone at yelp should get on this
This is for when a racist incident makes large national / international news and people (who don't frequent the business) flood the page with negative reviews.
Why didn't they just say: "We're going to lock reviews for x days when a business receives news or social media attention to prevent reviews from non-customers."
Twitter is full of people saying they've deleted the app, etc.
> Now, when a business gains public attention for reports of racist conduct, such as using racist language or symbols, Yelp will place a new Business Accused of Racist Behavior Alert on their Yelp page to inform users, along with a link to a news article where they can learn more about the incident.
While this is not quite as abusable as other commenters have claimed, there is definitely still some potential for abuse given how imperfect journalism (like all things) is at always reporting facts.
I don't have much to say except that Yelp shouldn't exist. Local reviews have become nationalized or even globalized. I wish the stakes could be lowered.