It seems like a lot of people took out their COVID frustrations on hard-hit restaurants and other small businesses this year.
According to Yelp’s Trust & Safety report for 2021, the user-generated local business review platform removed more than 15,500 reviews for violating the company’s COVID-19 content guidelines.
Yelp implemented its COVID-19 guidelines in March 2020 “to better protect businesses from reputational harm due to pandemic-related circumstances beyond their control.” Under these rules, the company removes user reviews that criticize businesses for following mandatory government regulations or for taking safety measures, such as requiring masks. Reviews are also removed under this policy if a user claims they contracted COVID-19 at an establishment or criticizes a business for altering their hours due to the pandemic.
Interestingly, the number of reviews removed from Yelp for violating this policy rose in 2021 by 161 percent compared to 2020, the year the pandemic began. Much like we’ve seen online and in news broadcasts, it appears that people are becoming more irritable about basic safety precautions as the pandemic continues and thousands still die every day in the U.S.
In addition to removing violations of those COVID-19 content guidelines, Yelp also proactively removed reviews that criticized companies’ vaccine policies across more than 103,500 business pages.
The report, which was released on Tuesday, says that more than 19.6 million reviews were submitted to Yelp in 2021. However, not all these reviews are highlighted by the company’s recommendation algorithm, and more than a million were removed by Yelp or the users themselves.
In addition to pandemic-related reviews, Yelp took action against more than 25,200 reviews due to “threats, lewdness, hate speech, or other potentially harmful content” last year.
Yelp isn’t the only online review platform that changed its rules to account for undeserved bad reviews due to COVID-19. In a post published on Wednesday, Google explained how the company has taken down reviews from Google Maps if the user criticized a business over safety measures and vaccine mandates.