Yelp temporarily disabled reviews of a Pennsylvania McDonald’s franchise that was visited by former President Donald Trump over the weekend after the restaurant was inundated with negative comments and one-star reviews.
The Republican presidential nominee spent time on Sunday making french fries and serving drive-thru customers at a McDonald’s franchise in Feasterville-Trevose, Pennsylvania, bringing a massive amount of attention to the fast-food location.
“I’m having a lot of fun here, everybody,” he said while working the drive-thru window.
As of Wednesday morning, the Yelp page for the McDonald’s location showed an “unusual activity alert” that said the restaurant “recently received increased public attention, which often means people come to this page to post their views on the news.”
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“While we don’t take a stand one way or the other when it comes to this incident, we’ve temporarily disabled the posting of content to this page as we work to investigate whether the content you see here reflects actual consumer experiences rather than the recent events,” the alert read. “Please note that we apply this same policy regardless of the business and regardless of the topic at issue.”
Reviews, including some supporting Trump and many others against the former president, of the Feasterville-Trevose McDonald’s poured in after the Republican candidate’s stop at the fast-food restaurant.
“For Yelp to remain a useful resource to the community, reviews must be based on a genuine, firsthand experience with the business. Due to increased public attention we saw after former President Trump visited a McDonald’s in Feasterville, PA on Sunday, October 20, we worked quickly to temporarily disable the posting of content to the page and placed an Unusual Activity Alert on Monday, October 21,” Noorie Malik, Yelp’s vice president of user operations, said Wednesday in a statement to FOX Business.
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Malik said moderators “will clean up the page so reviews describing only firsthand consumer experiences are reflected” once Yelp “see[s] the activity dramatically decrease or stop.”
Yelp applied nearly 990 “Unusual Activity Alerts” or “Public Attention Alerts” to businesses on its platform last year, including 799 “Unusual Activity Alerts,” and took down more than 33,700 posts linked to them, Yelp’s latest Trust & Safety report indicated.
When it came to attention stemming from politics or political figures specifically, Yelp put “Unusual Activity Alerts” on 112 pages in the U.S. last year, the report said. The platform took down over 5,000 reviews linked to them.
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Trump’s visit to the McDonald’s restaurant now under a Yelp “Unusual Activity Alert” came as both he and his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, have increased campaign events and rhetoric in the lead-up to Election Day.
Recent polling showed a tight race between the two candidates.
