Ain't it cool? Protection rackets are learning how to do PR and posing themselves as nice guys doing the right thing.

Edit: Yelp business model is basically taking the "influencers" game to scale. Remember when we were promised the "knowledge of the crowds"? Yelp, Putin and Facebook were smarter and gave us digitally manipulated lynch mobs instead. It seems far easier and more profitable to harness and manipulate ignorance than knowledge.

Yeah, give the plenty of nuts that will accuse businesses of anything a weapon to use against any random business...

They only do it in response to a news article, meaning that it's been vetted for credibility by a third party.

The problem is that I'm not sure "a third party" has a great track record either. Seems like something more like a judicial system is appropriate if policing enters the picture: right to face accusers, adjudication by peers, standards for proof, right to appeal, and so on.

What counts as a "news article"? Does a blog count? Does it have to be a "traditional" media outlet (eg. tv station, newspaper)? Do op-ed/letters to the editor/"contributor" sections count? How does reporting by a third party vet anything, if they're just repeating the person's claims? eg. "Local business is racist, customer claims" provides the same information as a yelp review saying "this business is racist!".

Sorry, but a news article "Business accused of racism" is hardly vetting.

Since you only need a clickbait chasing journalist and a twitter nutjob to produce one.

But these third parties already have a bad reputation concerning these issues. Problems like sensitivity readers are an example. The issues wouldn't be racism, it would quickly extend to businesses lacking sensitivity, whatever that would entail. It would lead to insatiable demands while reducing diversity of opinion.

'South Park' Compares Yelp Reviewers to ISIS

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/south-park-compares-y...

On a tangential note, this part of US history is somewhat relevant to this subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Motorist_Green_Book

Yelp is just looking for another extortion angle. You'll get a Racism Alert, but for a small monthly fee, you can make it go away.

Yelp needs to be sued out of existence.

This.

Also Yelp, like certain other evil tech companies (like Google and FB) probably tries to brainwash its employees into thinking that they're not evil, and this feature will help with that: "see! we're policing racism against BIPOCs! we are on the right side of history."

Would you please stop posting flamewar-style comments to HN? We're trying for something else here.

Also, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Get woke go broke.

Did nobody including this writer read the policy?

I mean as much as this sounds super dystopian I kinda want this information, ya know? Like I don’t care if the the owner or something is a racist asshole personally, that’s their business. But there are a more than a few businesses in my area who are openly explicitly white supremacist, anti-BLM, selling confederate flags and MAGA hats, selling those gross stickers of trump peeing on people, having their employees participate in marches. Like it’s wild — I didn’t expect that today you could just come out and say you’re a white supremacist in public. Apparently my filter bubble is thick.