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Smith’s Yelp reviews were shut down after a sudden activity on his page that labeled the company “unusual activity alerts,” a mere measure for the business and Yelp to filter through a flood of reviews and select which ones are spam. they are not. Noorie Malik, vice president of operations for Yelp users, said Yelp has a “moderator team” that researches pages that get an unusual amount of traffic. “Once we see that the activity is significantly reduced or stopped, we will clean up the page so that it directly reflects the consumer experience,” he said in a statement.
This is a practice that Yelp has had to spread more frequently during the pandemic: according to Yelp’s 2020 Confidence and Security Report, the company has seen a 206% increase in alerts for unusual activities from 2019 levels. “Since January 2021, we have posted more than 15 unusual activity alerts on business pages related to a business’s stance on covid-19 vaccines,” Malik said.
Most of those cases have been since May, like the gay CC Attles bars in Seattle alert from Yelp then the patrons showed proof of the vaccine at the door. Earlier this month, Moe’s Cantina in Chicago’s River North neighborhood received spam after trying to isolate it from uninserted clients some.
Spamming a business with one-star reviews is not a new tactic. In fact, perhaps the most well-known case is the Masterpiece Bakery in Colorado won the 2018 Supreme Court battle for refusing to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, and then being beaten by critics of a star. “People still write false opinions. People will always write false opinions, ”Liu says.
But he adds that today’s online audience knows that platforms use algorithms to detect and mark problematic words, so bad actors can mask their complaints by blaming a poor restaurant service for a more typical negative review to ensure that the rating goes up – and it’s worth it.
That seems to have happened with Knapp’s bar. Opinions on the Yelp service included comments like “There was hair in my food” or alleged observations of cockroaches. “Really ridiculous, fantastic shit,” Knapp says. “If you look at the previous opinions, you would immediately understand that this doesn’t make sense.”
Liu also said that there is a limit to how much Yelp can improve spam detection because the natural language – or the way it speaks, reads and writes – is “very difficult for computer systems to detect.”
Liu doesn’t think that putting people in charge of finding out what opinions are spam or not is going to solve the problem. “Man can’t do that,” he says. “Some can do it right, others can do it wrong. I have fake opinions on my website and I can’t even tell which ones are real or not. “
You’ll notice that I’ve mentioned Yelp reviews so far, although Google’s opinions – which appear in the business description box on the right side of the Google search results page in the “Reviews” section – may have an impact. In fact, Google’s review operations are even more mysterious.
I talked to the business that Yelp was working with them when it came to identifying spam comments, none of which were lucky enough to contact the Google team. “You’d think Google would say‘ There’s something fucked up here, ’” Knapp says. “These are IP addresses coming from abroad. It really weakens the review platform when things like this can happen. “
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