More than 2,000 racist reviews removed from Yelp during pandemic

WASHINGTON AP - As if running a restaurant during a pandemic wasn't tough enough, Christopher Wong had to contend with a racist troll.

I won't have my dog eat in this place because they might cook him, read the Yelp review of Wong's eatery, The Curry Up Cafe in suburban Los Angeles. The owner works for the Chinese government. Yelp removed the review after Wong complained and a number of regular customers complained, but not before it had already been seen by an unknown number of potential customers.

More than 2,000 racist business reviews were removed from Yelp last year, a nearly 10 fold jump over the year before they went online.

It is a sharp increase reflected by improved efforts by Yelp to combat racist content and shows how a site known for reviews of restaurants and repair services can become ensnared in America s ongoing battle over online civility.

The figures included in its annual trust and safety report released Wednesday showed the largest increase in reviews denigrating Asian Americans and Asian American-owned businesses, while the content included hate speech targeting Black, Latino and LGBTQ people.

In 2021, Yelp removed nine posts that included anti-Asian hate. It removed 475 in the year 2022.

Yelp began tracking racial hate speech on its platform in 2020, just as Asian Americans began to experience a rise in racially motivated hatred related to COVID 19, which was first identified in China. President Donald Trump referred to the coronaviruses as the kung flu and the Chinese virus. An increase in racist restaurant reviews isn't surprising, according to University of Michigan Marketing Professor Justin Huang, author of a study that found Asian restaurants saw an 18% drop in customers compared to non-Asian restaurants in the same communities in 2020, equating to more than $7 billion in lost revenue.

Huang said that there had been an increase in violent incidents and random attacks. Anti-Asian stigmatization during the pandemic runs the gamut. The number of business reviews that were removed last year that violated its rules about hate speech and threats of lewdness was an increase of 1,300 over the year before, according to Yelp.

The increase in anti-Asian content in the last year, Yelp removed hundreds of reviews containing anti-LGBTQ hate speech. Similar content has thrived on social media, both on fringe sites popular with extremists as well as on broad platforms like Twitter, which has seen a rise in racist posts after it was purchased by Elon Musk.

Since the pandemic began, Yelp has fine-tuned its efforts to identify and remove racist content. In 2020, the platform allowed businesses to identify that they had a Black, Asian, Asian or LGBTQ owner. Yelp proactively assesses customer reviews for hate speech before they are posted online.

The company is aggressive when it comes to taking down unreliable reviews, including those that contain hate speech, said Noorie Malik, Yelp's vice president of user operations.

Malik wrote a statement emailed to the AP that the trust and safety of the Yelp community is a top priority. We invest heavily in technology and human moderation because of this.