The customer-review social media platform Yelp will now allow people to call out businesses that display racist behavior. If you have questions, that's because you have more neurons than does the Yelp "User Operations Team" that decided on this new feature.
Sure, if you read the company's post at its blog you see language that says the warning will go up in order to let people know that an accusation has been made and so there might be an influx of bad reviews by people who just want to run the business down but who have never been a customer. And you see them saying that if an alert -- helpfully colored scarlet, doncha know -- is added to the page then there will be a link to a "credible news source" that reports on it.
As Kyle Smith notes at National Review, the world of social media reviewing platforms is often less than worthless. It's not just restaurants; I listen to a dozen or so podcasts regularly and they all ask you to give them five-star reviews because anything less than a 4.8 gets overlooked.
The problem is that it's not hard to create a sensational enough claim of racist treatment that it makes headlines in "credible news sources" even though it will later turn out to be false. And the removal of Yelp's scarlet R will draw a tenth of the attention that its placement did, perhaps permanently harming the business. That might be an acceptable risk if the placement of a racism warning via Yelp did anything real to advance the cause of racial equality, but no one who doesn't work for Yelp thinks that it does.
If they're going to go through with it, though, they might need a sweeping of their own house for starters.
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