A Yelp”Active Cleanup Alert” is displayed by Yelp when Yelp’s user support team sees signs of controversial, media-fueled activity on a business page. The Active Cleanup Alert prevents users from leaving reviews and directs Yelp users to post any and all thoughts on “Yelp Talk”, Yelp’s open discussion forum, until unwanted activity slows down.

In many cases, after the alert is removed, pages later display a message which reads “This business is being monitored by Yelp’s Support team for content related to media reports.”

Examples

I am assuming you found this page as you’re a Yelp user, however I do have several people who come here for local search news. Or, maybe you are a business owner at the center of the latest controversy. Anyways, here are some examples:

  • A coffee shop in Hawaii put up a sign which said that people who voted for Donald Trump were not welcome. Fox News covered this and immediately they had all sorts of attention for a while.
  • Cecil the Lion was killed by a dentist. I have no idea what this story is about but I do remember watching the dentist’s page get slammed on Yelp. To this day, years later, the bad reviews are still coming in, and Yelp is missing them. You can see the dentist’s Yelp page here.

What an Active Cleanup Alert looks like

Here’s a screenshot of what an Active Cleanup Alert looks like:

screenshot of a Yelp Active Cleanup Alert

It reads:

Active Cleanup Alert

This business recently made waves in the news, which often means that people come to this page to post their reactions.

The best place to share your thoughts is on Yelp Talk. You are also welcome to post a review about this business, but we will ultimately remove reviews that appear to be motivated more by the news coverage itself than by the reviewer’s own customer experience with the business (even if that means removing points of view we might agree with).

Please note that we apply this same policy regardless of the business and regardless of the topic at issue in order to avoid injecting our own varied viewpoints into the debate. Read more on Yelp Support.

Yelp began this process in 2015 and announced it on their blog in 2016.

Len
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