[ad_1]
Smith’s Yelp comment was closed after a series of activities suddenly appeared on its page. The company marked it as an “abnormal activity alert”. This is the company and Yelp filter a large number of comments and pick out which are spam and which are expedient. Measures. It’s not. Noorie Malik, Yelp’s vice president of user operations, said that Yelp has a “moderate team” that is responsible for investigating pages that receive abnormal traffic. “After we see a sharp reduction or cessation of activity, we will clean up the page to reflect only the first-hand consumer experience,” she said in a statement.
This is a practice that Yelp had to deploy more frequently during the pandemic: according to Yelp Trust and Safety Report 2020, The company’s abnormal activity alert level increased by 206% from 2019. Malik said: “Since January 2021, we have placed more than 15 unusual activity alerts on corporate pages related to corporate stance on covid-19 vaccination.”
Most of these cases occurred after May, such as the gay bar CC Attles in Seattle, which obtained Alert from Yelp After it asked the customer to show the vaccination certificate at the door.Earlier this month, Moe’s Cantina in the North River neighborhood of Chicago received spam after trying to quarantine From unvaccinated vaccinated customers Those ones.
Sending spam to companies with one-star reviews is not a new strategy.In fact, perhaps the most famous case is the Masterpiece Bakery in Colorado, which Won the battle of the Supreme Court in 2018 He refused to make wedding cakes for same-sex couples and was later criticized by a one-star review. “People are still writing fake reviews. People always write fake reviews,” Liu said.
But he added that today’s online audiences know that platforms use algorithms to detect and flag questionable words, so bad actors can conceal their dissatisfaction by accusing bad restaurant service, such as more typical negative reviews, to ensure that ratings are maintained Unchanging-and important.
This seems to be the case with Knapp’s bar. His Yelp comments include comments such as “Hair in my food” or so-called cockroach sightings. “Really ridiculous, great,” Knapp said. “If you look at the previous comments, you will immediately understand that it is meaningless.”
Liu also stated that the extent to which Yelp can improve spam detection is limited, because natural language—or the way we speak, read, and write—“is very difficult for computer systems to detect.”
But Liu does not think that having one person in charge of finding out which comments are spam will solve the problem. “Humans can’t do it,” he said. “Some people may be doing it right, some people may be doing it wrong. There are false comments on my webpage, and I can’t even tell which ones are real.
You may have noticed that I have only mentioned Yelp reviews so far, despite the fact that Google reviews (which appear in the business description box under “Comments” on the right side of the Google search results page) can be said to be more influential. Frankly speaking, this is because Google’s censorship operation is more mysterious.
Although the companies I interviewed said that Yelp worked with them to identify spam comments, none of them had any luck in contacting the Google team. “You would think Google would say,’Something messed up here,'” Knapp said. “These are IP addresses from overseas. When something like this is allowed to happen, it really undermines the censorship platform.”
[ad_2]
Source link
