How Social Engineers Like Me Can Hack Yelp’s “Racist Beavior” Tag

New “Business Accused of Racist Behavior” tag on Yelp Draws Skepticism

I’m not endorsing this idea but like anything else that can be gamed and manipulated social engineers like myself could take advantage of and ruin a business via Yelp’s policies that many business owners and comments online portray them to be modern day mafia and extortionists.

So a little about Yelp’s new policy and then we can have a brief discussion on how to exploit this.

Yelp, the popular crowdsourcing business review website, launched a new initiative last week to penalize racist behavior. For the first time, companies reported for racist behavior will now have an alert attached to their name and there’s no where that states a way in which they can get it deleted or removed.

While this seems like a positive move, in theory, many businesses are worried about how quickly their reputation can take a hit without any reputable proof and even more concerning is how this could actually lead to more segregation the exact thing we’re trying to avoid in this fragile world. A comment from Klaris Qiu says “that this system could result in abuse.

It is not clear to me what flagged businesses can do to get a “racist” tag removed. In addition, such a system could actually create a situation where some businesses end up being attractive to white racists — in other words, encouraging division when what we need right now is conciliation.”

Curbing racism is extremely important but Yelp isn’t our solution

Yelp is always looking for new ways to provide customers with more accurate reviews and they have failed miserably in that even being called the Billion Dollar Bully. It’s no easy job to police the internet as anybody on Twitter or Facebook can confirm these days.

Many business owners have a love/hate relationship with Yelp, as it is viewed as a must to keep up with the times. Businesses can’t avoid being on Yelp and even though it’s not always seen as credible it’s still a go to source to find restaurants to eat at.

Poor reviews already have a massive impact on businesses, even if they are not entirely accurate. A company can take a considerable reputation hit just by a disgruntled customer or two typing out their thoughts. Not only that, but there is nothing truly stopping competition leaving negative reviews to make a rival company look bad.

This new racist label has many business owners already worried that it could be a death sentence as soon as it goes into place and hackers like myself who know how to exploit things online could badly take advantage of this and destroy a businesses reputation. While this is entirely unethical and should never be done the window is wide open for fraud to destroy a business and send the mob after an alleged racist business. They will no doubt be plenty of businesses that thoroughly deserve the label, but being falsely accused without Yelp going through all the proper standards could open up a ton of new issues and that’s where the problem lays. Personally it would be great to erradicate racism but thinking Yelp is the solution is like saying Donald is the solution to end that in the USA too… It’s entirely farfetched no matter what flag you fly.

Can Yelp get this right?

Yelp stated that they would only put this tag on businesses once there are reports of racism in an actual news article from a credible media outlet. It will pop-up over all of the typical reviews, and a person will have to physically click away to get to the rest of the page.

As we know about the fake news plague and that journalists often have stories plagued with inaccuracies and misleading statements. Even worse is that a business owner can be accused of prejudice and racism while they could be at the forefront of fighting for civil liberties but one bad employee or misunderstanding can lead to a label that isn’t representative of a company.

I can imagine each day at Wal-Mart there’s racism so should we now have a warning on every single wal-mart online?

Yelp must ensure that they get this right, as companies are fighting back against reputation damage and false accusations found online more than ever. One relatively recent case took place in Ohio, as Gibson’s Bakery in Oberlin received a ton of backlash in 2016 after calling the police on a student shoplifting from their store. The initial outcry claimed the bakery was racist, profiling an individual and falsely calling the police. Their reputation took a huge hit overnight, leading to protests outside their doors and negative reviews killing a bakery in business for over 120 years. Even though the shoplifter later confessed to the crime and the bakery was cleared of any wrongdoing, the damage is still felt today. One of the few things to do today is using an online reputation management company to fix the old false results online and using an expert witness like me to help recover damages.

If Yelp plans on truly making this new label a positive, they must gather as much information as possible before handing out tags. Instead of relying on the court of public opinion, claims of racism need thorough research before effectively killing a business. With Yelp laying off the majority of their sales team and staff during the pandemic it’s an expense they aren’t saying they’re going to absorb.

Yelp has a ton of power in the situation, and no company wants to deal with the thought of losing everything over a false accusation.

So how do we engineer this situation?

It’s extremely easy. You can create and build up a profile on social media channels or purchase one of the millions of fake profiles for sale. Once there you can start leaving reviews in town and then hit the business with the false racism accusation. With this accusation you go to Tweet it and with bots running and re-tweeting you can help the false accusation to go viral. You can then send that over to a news site or post on the many fake news sites that appear real and then alert Yelp to the case.

It’s also very easy to film videos outside of a restaurant and claim they wouldnt let you in because of the color of your clothing and blame race as the reason and then report that to the news.

There’s many ways to take down a business you don’t like with Yelps new policy and while I don’t want to promote the idea it’s probably going to cause more harm than good.