One disadvantage of online communities is the anonymity which trolls (people who participate purely to cause grief) are afforded. Yelp Director of Marketing Laure Nestler shares how Yelp addresses trolls.

When asked how trolling is addressed at Yelp, Nestler answers “Vigilantly. If consumers don’t trust our content, people stop using Yelp, and everyone loses: consumers don’t have a resource they can trust to make spending decisions, and would-be customers stop visiting business owners’ listings. We have safeguards in place to protect to protect consumers and business owners from fake, biased or malicious reviews.”

There are three key pillars to Yelp’s approach to addressing trolls.

Review filter

We have an automated Review Filter, which is always out there looking for suspicious reviewing activity (like those anonymous rants and raves you see on other sites). In fact, we actually discourage businesses from asking their customers to write reviews to keep things as trustworthy as possible. (I should also note that the Review Filter affects both advertisers and non-advertisers alike.)

Content guidelines

If reviews violate our Content Guidelines, our customer service team can and will manually remove the review.

Self regulation

Our vibrant and engaged communities can easily sniff out spam and can (and often do) flag suspicious reviews. In the same way you wouldn’t trust someone on Twitter with 2 followers who was following 5,000 people, the more active and engaged you become on Yelp, the more trustworthy your reviews become.