Yelp released its 2022 Trust and Safety Report, highlighting efforts to combat lead generators, fake review groups, and businesses that incentivize reviews.
## Yelp Cracks Down on Paid Review Groups
The report outlines Yelp’s proactive strategy to dismantle online review groups engaged in paid review schemes. Tactics include identifying IP addresses used for fake positive reviews and connecting users to groups that arrange paid reviews.
Yelp’s Trust and Safety team collaborates with social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to identify and break up these groups. In a 2021 blog post, Yelp revealed that it monitors online groups and conducts sting operations to expose fake review activities.
Yelp explains in their Trust and Safety report:
> “Yelp strictly prohibits offering incentives or other compensation in exchange for writing, changing, or removing a review.
> To combat this both on and off our platform, our User Operations team did the following in 2022:
>
> – Issued 415+ warnings to businesses for engaging in compensated or incentivized review behaviors.
> – Placed 88 Compensated Activity Alerts on business pages after detecting evidence of incentive-driven reviews.
> – Placed 405 Suspicious Review Activity Alerts after detecting a large number of positive reviews from a single IP address or users connected to incentivized review groups.
> – Made 1,100+ reports to third-party sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to warn them about content from suspicious groups, posts, or individuals participating in online review exchanges.
>
> Third-party platforms took action on about 77% of our reports.”
## Yelp Closes Thousands of Fraudulent Accounts
The report indicates that Yelp shut down over 77,000 user accounts for violating terms of service and engaging in deceptive or abusive actions. Additionally, more than 32,800 potential new business pages were rejected due to spammy activities that breached Yelp’s policies.
Yelp targeted lead generation businesses creating fake listings to sell leads to local businesses. Nearly 2,000 business pages were removed for being associated with lead generators. These fake listings mislead consumers and drive up costs unfairly, targeting vulnerable individuals seeking services like locksmiths, movers, and home cleaners.
## Yelp User Operations Team Content Removals
In 2022, Yelp’s user operations team removed 2% of all contributions, encompassing reviews, photos, review up-votes, and other forms of input from users.
## Yelp Trust and Safety
The integrity of reviews is crucial for a recommendation platform like Yelp. Their first line of defense is a recommendation software that dynamically monitors user and business activities. This automated system applies uniform rules to every business, and the recommended reviews can change as the software gathers more data about reviewers and businesses.
Yelp states:
> “The recommendation software is entirely automated and applies the same objective rules to every business. The reviews that are recommended for any business can change over time as Yelp’s software learns more about the reviewers and the business.”
In addition to automated systems, Yelp employs human moderators within their User Operations team to manually review reports generated by users, businesses, or their automated systems.
