Yelp Says It Will Mark Pages of Businesses Accused of Racist Conduct

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/business/yelp-racism.html

by notadev • 6 years ago

25 29 6 years ago

nytimes.com

bfieidhbrjr• 6 years ago

What could go wrong?

jgalt212• 6 years ago

A noble effort, for sure, but to properly adjudicate this could consume boundless resources.

On the other hand, paying Yelp money to take down such notices from a business's page could be a robust revenue stream. Didn't something like this happen before?

eggy• 6 years ago

Good intention or not, it reeks of ochlocracy and ignorance, and throw in potential quasi-extortion-for-revenue tactics.

whimsicalism4• 6 years ago

If you read the article, the "credible media outlet" would be adjudicating. If it is defamatory, they can take it up with the outlet.

beatrobot• 6 years ago

How much will they charge businesses to get it removed from their pages ?

maxcbc• 6 years ago

So much for innocent until proven guilty

whimsicalism4• 6 years ago

It's their free speech, and Yelp isn't a court of law. If there is an article reporting a business as engaged in racist practices, it is their right to link to such an article on the website Yelp owns.

Shared404• 6 years ago

Hard to tell if this is (well intentioned, but misguided) OR (They know how easy it will be to abuse, and really want money).

commandlinefan• 6 years ago

I’d be curious to see an example - there aren’t any in the article.

zepto• 6 years ago

Why would this not be the subject of a defamation suit?

whimsicalism4• 6 years ago

Are review sites normally the target of such suits or is it the poster of the review?

These would be linking to credible news outlets, so seems like the owner should take it up with them. My guess is it is hard to win a defamation suit against the lawyers for someone like the NYT.

mansion72• 6 years ago

Ah, so like Wikipedia they will launder their ideology through "credible news outlets".

"Don't blame us! A source with no proof and an axe to grind, told unverifiable gossip to an unaccountable journalist, who just happens to agree with us politically. But we're credible, so you're a racist now."

This is actually a good thing. Though the mainstream media has very little remaining credibility, Yelp will help eradicate the remaining shreds by further exposing the myth that media has built around itself; namely that they are unbiased, trustworthy purveyors of truth.

zarkov99• 6 years ago

Yeah, there is no way this will be abused. #believeallaccusers

DeonPenny• 6 years ago

Can you mark yelp the company as racist on yelp cause they've definitely been accuse of racism. I don't know a specific time but my intuition of how the world works tells me this is true.

LatteLazy• 6 years ago

Yelp says it will mark businesses as racist randomly then charge them to remove the marks.

throwawaysea3• 6 years ago

This feels like McCarthyism 2.0 and will be abused. I can see someone accusing a business then disagree with of racism even if their disagreement concerns unrelated matters (a lone incident of bad service, an unrelated political position from the owners, a refusal to grant a refund, whatever).

Pfhreak3• 6 years ago

Wouldn't McCarthyism 2.0 be, for example, the ongoing efforts to stigmatize Communism and Socialism in the States? The administration recently banned visas for anyone affiliated with a Communist Party.

Socialism, meanwhile, is very much a dirty word in American politics. Biden and Warren, for instance, went to great lengths to distance themselves from 'Socialism'.

Yes, labeling a business as racist could be misused and is potentially very problematic, but it hardly rises to the level of McCarthyism.

throwawaysea3• 6 years ago

Modern cancel culture is McCarthyism, but widespread and at scale. There are numerous parallels - accusations without evidence, damaging impact without due process, changing definitions/goal posts, hyperbolic accusations, political repression, and the destruction of many careers. Labeling people with pejoratives is exactly the weapon used to silence opponents. Most typically I’ve seen it used against those that don’t align with progressive viewpoints, although that’s not always the case.

We’ve already seen the damage that cancel culture can do, and so Yelp giving random people a way to damage an individual or business without a principled process (like that of the courts) seems like a really messy and bad idea that’ll make cancel culture worse.

As for your notes on Communism - to me banning visas of those associated with such policies/parties seems reasonable. Marxism/collectivism is responsible for tens of millions of deaths in the 20th century and we have numerous data points showing that these ideas not only don’t work, but that their implementation requires brutal governance that is in conflict with our most basic principles, like free speech. So yes I do not welcome anyone affiliated with such parties into my country just as I would not welcome terrorists.

eddhead2• 6 years ago

I'm gonna tag all Businesses as racist, I must be right cos I'm PoC. I'll probably hook it up with Yelps own POI API and write a script to tag Everything.

Throw in some other random dog-whistles while we're at it.

eddhead2• 6 years ago

Does anyone remember Social Autopsy? Yelp just found it's Business model.

nix23• 6 years ago

Let's mark Yelp as Fascist because they think they have to be the Jude/DOJ in a Country with Free Speech.

OR stop using that blackmail company.

diego_moita• 6 years ago

Ain't it cool? Protection rackets are learning how to do PR and posing themselves as nice guys doing the right thing.

Yelp business model is basically taking the "influencers" game to scale mixed with the mafia "protection" service.

Remember when we were promised the "knowledge of the crowds"? Yelp, Putin and Facebook were smarter and gave us digitally manipulated lynch mobs instead. It seems far easier and more profitable to harness and manipulate ignorance than knowledge.

raxxorrax• 6 years ago

It could also be a distraction or appeasement from internal issues:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24544825

Yelp Says It Will Mark Pages of Businesses Accused of Racist Conduct

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