Posted on 06/13/2021 8:49:16 PM PDT by DoodleBob
On the first hot weekend of the summer, Richard Knapp put up a sign outside Mother’s Ruin, a bar tucked in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. It had two arrows: one pointing vaccinated people indoors, another pointing unvaccinated people outdoors.
The Instagram post showing the sign (above) quickly went viral among European anti-vaxxers on Reddit. “We started receiving hate mail through the Google portal,” Knapp says, estimating he’d received about a “few dozen” emails: “I’ve been called a Nazi and a communist in the same sentence. People hope that our bar burns down. It’s a name and shame campaign.” It wasn’t just the emails. Soon, his bar started receiving multiple one-star reviews on Yelp and Google Reviews from accounts as far away as Europe.
Spamming review portals with negative ratings is not a new phenomenon. Throughout the pandemic, the tactic has also been deployed to attack bars and restaurants that enforced mask-wearing for safety. As pandemic restrictions have lifted, businesses like Mother’s Ruin have sought to ensure that safety by requiring proof of vaccination using state-sponsored apps like New York’s Excelsior Pass, vaccine passports, or simply flashing vaccine cards at the door — practices that have instigated a second surge of spam reviews.
These spam one-star reviews can be extremely damaging. The default mode for viewing reviews is in chronological order, from newest to oldest, which means a spam attack places fake reviews up top, making the most recent reviews that much more influential if you’re the victim of a concerted campaign.
While some companies have gotten around this issue on their own sites by verifying that reviewers are actual customers by reaching out to them via email and matching them with what they have on file, industry-leading platforms like Yelp and Google let anyone.. rate and review a business.
(Excerpt) Read more at technologyreview.com ...
Is this MIT’s first review of the vax social dynamics?
Or vax Rats.
such a sweet and happy story. sanity is still alive and well.
And Yelp is the same disgusting organization that is shaking down businesses to prove they are “anti-racist.” Don’t trust anything on that garbage website.
Conform much?
Let’s see your HIV vaccine papers please? Or Ebola?
I guess you just don’t quite understand Liberty.
You can only abuse people so much before they start pushing back. My state lifted mask requirements completely and requiring one is voluntary. Any place that requires a mask is a place I won’t return to. For any establishment that went above and beyond state requirements (in other words, they were making up requirements as a power-trip), I will NEVER go back and I’ve posted negative reviews anywhere I can.
Exactly. You can tell the ones that enjoy telling people where to stand, where to go, which door to enter/leave from, what to wear, etc. They’ve liked that power and don’t want to give it up. Enjoy watching your business crumble, morons.
Nice response. I think you can be counted as a friend.
I don’t play the “Comrade, your papers please” game.
Wow. Another place to slam places like this bar online is Tripadvisor.com. I haven’t bothered with Yelp in years - they kept pushing their stupid app, so I stopped going to their website.
Hayek watched the Nazis and Communists in the 1930s and saw there was very little difference between them. See the two-paragraph quote on my profile page, 3rd one down.
The article doesn’t mention it, but the NYC restaurant owner is likely just complying with health department rules. His choices are suffer some bad reviews on yelp or possibly get fined or shutdown for not complying.
I AM fully vaccinated.
[against all childhood diseases present in the 60s, a couple-three “hold muh beer and watch this” tetanus shots and the rabies series]
:)
Yelp encouraged this with an annoying set of review questions about how the restaurant is “handling Covid,” such as, “were the employees wearing masks,” “was social distancing practiced,” etc. I travel a lot and I find Yelp very useful but during this whole covid nonsense, it seemed mainly that the Karens were using it to trash restaurants that didn’t display the right level of paranoia and engage in bizarre Covid theater. “Eeeek…the dishwasher wasn’t wearing a mask, I’ve never felt so threatened in my life,” etc.
All of these potentially useful review or community information sites (Yelp, Nextdoor, etc.) turned into platforms for Karens to destroy struggling businesses, and generally the sites did nothing to stop it and even seem to have encouraged it.
So consider this payback, although more factually based. I’d certainly never go to a restaurant that had vaccine requirements (even though I got the vaccine months ago) and I’d like to know in advance so I wouldn’t have to even bother with that restaurant.
We should just wear our yellow stars and accept our fate as unclean outcasts.
Or not.
:D
There are no vax rats.
They all died during “testing”.
Don’t get uppity....they have a right to make a choice about ‘the jab’ just as you do to not get it.
However, I do not have the choice of having mutated “viruses” shed on me.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.