Fabricius Wiest, the owner of Hayes Valley German restaurant Suppenküche, was saddened to see a neighboring business close after just three months. Wiest posted a sign in his business window supporting Kis Cafe, a now-closed wine bar then embroiled in an internet backlash over an interaction with an influencer.
Within hours, Suppenküche saw a rapid spike in reviews, many of which were from outside of the Bay Area. The 32-year old business saw its online ratings tank from 4.5 to 4.1 stars. Wiest had no idea what had hit them until his more online children explained the controversy.
They moved quickly to report the comments, a process that took only two clicks and two questions. After a few hours, an “Unusual Activity Alert” banner flashed on Suppenküche’s Yelp page. The sour reviews were blocked and, within a day, the platform had helped Wiest get his page back in order, stars and all.
Yelp first implemented its stopgaps to manage potential spammers in 2012. There are famous instances of Yelp backlash dating back to the pre-virality era such as the Florida red sauce joint owner who bear-hugged Obama, or the Colorado bakery owner who refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, but the phenomenon of Yelp brigading has taken off in recent years. During the pandemic, anti-maskers would wield their keyboards to tank the scores of businesses with mask enforcement rules. Bars with vaccine requirements met a similar fate. These days, it’s a common occurrence in the cold war between influencers and restaurants.
Yelp uses a recommendation software to boost high quality reviews and weed out reviews that may be biased, fake, or an “unhelpful rant.” If a business has a sudden torrent of reviews, an Unusual Activity Alert is triggered, prompting a team of moderators to review the page. The support team enacts an “Active Cleanup Alert,” which signals their intervention after the first signs of unusual activity on a business’ page. From there, the support team may direct users to Yelp Talk, an open discussion forum meant to contain any political or social discourse that would otherwise harm a business’ rating. “Reviews that are written as a form of social commentary are not useful for people who rely on Yelp for accurate, first-hand descriptions of the experience at a business,” the company says on its website.
Meanwhile, Suppenküche staff said they had no issue removing negative reviews from the restaurant’s Google Business profile; in fact, Google went ahead and did it for them, with zero request or intervention from the business itself. Exactly how remains to be revealed, as the tech giant has been notoriously taciturn about its internal systems. Its content policy prohibits things like spam, though it’s unclear whether its review filter is human, machine, or both. Unlike Yelp, Google doesn’t list alerts on pages with unusual traffic, so there is no clear messaging that anything unusual is afoot. The company didn’t respond to requests for information on its content moderation practices, nor is the information publicly available.
As instances of what scholars refer to as “deceptive opinion spam” recur, Yelp’s content moderation system seems to be working overtime. Last year, 920 Unusual Activity and Public Attention Alerts were placed on business pages, resulting in the removal of more than 41,500 reviews for incidents stemming from social media alone, according to the company’s 2024 Trust and Safety Report. This number has steadily increased since the program was implemented. Deceptive opinion spam often peaks around contentious events like elections: Yelp saw a 96 percent increase year-over-year in Unusual Activity Alerts related to political incidents in 2024.
In the aftermath of its digital ambush, Suppenküche’s page still displays the Unusual Activity Alert, and below the list of reviews Yelp has catalogued 276 reviews that are “not currently recommended” and do not factor into the restaurant’s overall rating.
“When people express their opinions through reviews in an attempt to artificially inflate or deflate a business’s star rating, they can potentially mislead consumers or harm the business,” Kylie Banks, a Yelp spokesperson told Gazetteer. “For Yelp to remain a useful resource to the community, reviews must be based on a genuine, firsthand experience with the business.”
