Yelp has temporarily disabled reviews for the McDonald’s in Pennsylvania where former President Donald J. Trump held a campaign photo op because of a flood of phony write-ups and ratings.
On Sunday, Mr. Trump donned an apron and briefly worked the fryer at a McDonald’s in Bucks County, Pa., where he distributed orders to preselected customers in the drive-through and spoke with reporters.
But his customer service led to a flurry of mocking reviews that were not based on customers’ firsthand experiences, as required. Instead, the reviews on the restaurant’s Yelp page criticized Mr. Trump and also took aim at the franchise, while some celebrated the former president.
“Don’t let convicted felons who tried to overturn an election stage campaign stunts,” one reviewer wrote.
“This was an awful thing that was done and McDonald’s is now the new chick filet , and will get ZERO of my money and my business , hope it was worth alienating EVERY Woman in the USA,” another reviewer wrote.
“There was a giant orange rat in the kitchen. The operator let it in to roam around and even posted pictures of it. Pretty weird,” another wrote.
Some expressed support for Mr. Trump.
“The best McDonalds I’ve ever been to in 47 years. The older employee was extremely nice. Make McDonalds Great Again! Bring back the Dollar Menu!” one wrote.
More than 145 reviews were posted before Yelp temporarily disabled new comments at around 3 p.m. on Monday, according to the company.
As of Tuesday evening, customers who visit the page are met with an “unusual activity alert” notice, explaining that the business “received increased public attention, which often means people come to this page to post their views on the news.”
“While we don’t take a stand one way or the other when it comes to this incident, we’ve temporarily disabled the posting of content to this page as we work to investigate whether the content you see here reflects actual consumer experiences rather than the recent events,” the alert said. “Please note that we apply this same policy regardless of the business and regardless of the topic at issue.”
Customers interested in leaving a review “based on a firsthand experience with the business” were advised to come back at a later date.
According to the 2023 Yelp Trust & Safety Report, Yelp placed 986 alerts on business pages related to a business that gained public attention, resulting in the removal of more than 49,100 reviews.
“For Yelp to remain a useful resource to the community, reviews must be based on a genuine, firsthand experience with the business,” Noorie Malik, Yelp’s vice president of user operations, said in a statement. “When we see the activity dramatically decrease or stop, our moderators will clean up the page so reviews describing only firsthand consumer experiences are reflected.”
How long that process may take or when new reviews would be enabled again was not clear on Tuesday evening.
The unusual campaign stop by Mr. Trump was another opportunity for the former president to claim, without evidence, that Vice President Kamala Harris lied about working at McDonald’s as a college student.
Ms. Harris’s campaign said she worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda, Calif., in 1983 during the summer after her freshman year at Howard University. A friend of Ms. Harris recently told The New York Times that the vice president’s mother, who died in 2009, had told her about the summer job.
McDonald’s representatives have ignored media requests for information.
CNN reported that it had obtained an internal memo by McDonald’s to its employees saying that it did not invite Mr. Trump to the restaurant.
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