Yelp Details Fraud Initiatives In Trust & Safety Report

Yelp has debuted its new Trust and Safety website to help bolster knowledge about its fraud-fighting measures and released its 2020 Trust and Safety Report, according to a press release.

The new site will “help Yelp maintain our content integrity and protect our community of consumers and business owners,” the release stated.

That will include insights on Yelp’s automation recommendation software, the consumer alerts program and how the company moderates content. In addition, the site will detail data on health and safety information that might otherwise be harder for people to find, according to the release.

There will also be business attributes that help people find businesses that align with their values and which take security procedures seriously, the release stated.

In addition, the release detailed the key findings from the 2020 Trust and Safety Report. Yelp received over 18.1 million reviews in 2020, and of those “more than 4.6 million reviews … were not recommended by our recommendation software because it suspected the reviews were a conflict of interest, fake, less useful, solicited, or otherwise less reliable,” the release stated.

There were over 2,500 total consumer alerts on business pages, which were found to be up 93 percent since 2019, the release stated, and which help warn consumers about “egregious attempts to manipulate ratings and reviews.”

The report stated that Yelp found and removed 5,200 reviews which had violated its standards for COVID-19 guidelines between the beginning of the pandemic last March and the end of 2020, with over 13,300 reviews removed for “threats, lewdness, hate speech, or other similarly harmful content” between May and December. There were around 100,000 accounts closed for suspicious behaviors.

A separate Yelp report showed that many businesses are recovering from pandemic-related lows, showing that food and restaurant establishments are now open around the same level as before, and that they had been able to successfully adapt their operations to a new environment.

The report also found that new openings were also doing fine, only being 4 percent off in the fourth quarter.