Yelp Will Now Mark Business Pages Accused Of Racism With Alerts

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Yelp just announced that they will now post alerts on business pages where customers or employees have reported “overtly racist actions.”

The review site explained that customers will now be able to flag incidents of racism, and once that happens, the site will place a “business accused of racist behavior” alert on an establishment’s page when it “gains public attention for reports of racist conduct, such as using racist language or symbols.”

“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 a blog post.

While this is obviously a positive for a lot of people, Yelp’s announcement did have many wondering how it will carry out the initiative toguarantee that businesses are not falsely targeted with reports of racism or defamatory reviews, which can really hurt an establishment.

According to the company, these racism alerts will be authenticated by links to news stories, where customers can find out more about the incident. Yelp has actually used similar lower-level “public attention” alerts to flag establishments involved in racist incidents in the past. The site verifies such allegations using a team of moderators who study the Yelp comments of a business to see if other users have also had the same experience.