Yelp stands firm
Love it or hate it, the company's AI rules and hate speech policies remain robust in a new era of internet chaos.
Yelp released its annual trust and safety report today. It’s a transparent look at the worst of the platform with info on bad-acting accounts, reviews, and businesses. It also details the company’s efforts to mitigate these problems. And in this, the first week of February and third week of a tense American presidency already defined by decreased regulation and online guardrails, it reads like an anomaly.
Take the world’s biggest social network: Ahead of the inauguration, Facebook parent Meta revised its own policies, loosening restrictions on hate speech on the platform. It instructed internal teams to stop penalizing misinformation — lies — in algorithmic rankings. It ditched professional fact-checking in favor of unpaid user “community notes,” a tactic favored by Elon Musk, owner of Twitter-now-X and the billionaire currently working to consolidate power in the federal government.
Who’d’ve thought Yelp would become a beacon of truth in the internet’s next wild west era?
“We are committed to being the platform where genuine, firsthand reviews help local communities thrive,” Noorie Malik, vice president of user operations at Yelp, said in a statement tied to the trust and safety report’s release.
According to its posted stats, Yelp removed close to 50,000 reviews containing inappropriate content last year. Artificial intelligence helped ID about half of them as potential hate speech, lewd language, or threats. The other half were reported as such by Yelp users, then removed by the company.
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