At a time when businesses face an unprecedented threat of race-riot looting, review website Yelp has announced it will introduce warning labels that tell the public if a business has been “accused of racist behavior.”
In a blog post, Yelp’s vice president of user operations said, “as the nation reckons with issues of systemic racism, we’ve seen in the last few months that there is a clear need to warn consumers about businesses associated with egregious, racially charged actions to help people make more informed spending decisions.”
Lists of businesses and organizations accused of racism and bigotry are not new, but they are dangerous. The far-left Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of “hate groups,” regularly used to smear and defame mainstream conservatives, was used by a left-wing domestic terrorist to identify a target, the Family Research Council.
The attempted mass shooting, by now-convicted domestic terrorist Floyd Lee Corkins, was stopped by a security guard at the FRC offices, who tackled Corkins and disarmed him, suffering a shattered arm in the process as the extremist opened fire.
Conservative journalist and filmmaker Mike Cernovich posted a picture of the highly visible warning label on his Twitter account, which many are calling a “scarlet letter.”
Observers on social media quickly pointed out that as Yelp has itself been recently accused by the mainstream media of “racist behavior,” it would have to apply the label to itself.
“At Yelp’s Phoenix office, some insiders say a ‘boy’s club’ atmosphere fueled racism, sexism, and a hard-partying culture,” said a Business Insider headline just last month.
Yelp’s decision drew instant condemnation from conservatives, Trump supporters, and libertarians on social media. The examples below are just a small selection.
“The bullsh** never ends,” said Donald Trump Jr. “What are the odds that this isn’t insanely abused?”
“You are weaponizing defamation. More work for me, more litigation for you,” said Harmeet Dhillon, conservative attorney and founder of the Center for American Liberty, a legal nonprofit that fights civil rights cases.
“Yelp is now handing over its company to Antifa’s doxxing army & SPLC;s defamers” said conservative author Michelle Malkin, who also hosted a Periscope video urging her followers to boycott the company.
“Who needs a state-run tyrannical social credit system like China when your “private” corporations do it out of the goodness of their own PR departments?” asked Ryan Williams, president of the Claremont Institute.
“This is an inducement to false accusation and thuggery,” said Dinesh D’Souza.
“Honest to God I read this tweet without looking at the account and thought it was a parody. But no, it’s real. Yelp is really giving race hoaxers a specific tool to destroy any business they want on a whim,” said podcast host and writer Matt Walsh.
“What a great idea, with zero potential for abuse,” said Robby Soave, senior editor at the libertarian magazine Reason.
Yelp’s tweet announcing the feature has generated enormous amounts of discussion on Twitter. It has already accumulated over 14,000 replies and nearly 6,000 quotes, many of them condemning the company for empowering “cancel culture”, a social trend characterized by ritual denunciations and smear campaigns, recently condemned by President Trump.
Breitbart News has reached to Yelp out for comment.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. His new book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election, which contains exclusive interviews with sources inside Google, Facebook, and other tech companies, is currently available for purchase.
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