Crowd sourced review website Yelp on Tuesday disabled reviews for a McDonald’s franchise in Pennsylvania where former US President Donald Trump served French fries during a weekend campaign stop. The decision was made after the page was hit by a flurry of politicized reviews.
“This business recently received increased public attention, which often means people come to this page to post their views on the news,” Yelp’s announcement on the site read.
“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,” it added.
Supporters of the former president left glowing reviews, with one commenting, “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!”
However, others flooded the page with one-star reviews and comments unrelated to the restaurant’s food or service. One reviewer wrote, “The fries were too salty as if someone who lost a major election had been crying over them for an hour.”
According to Yelp’s recent trust and safety report, 112 business pages in the US received unusual activity alerts last year for incidents related to politics or political figures, resulting in the removal of more than 5,000 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, vice president of user operations at Yelp, told The Post.
The fast food chain was thrust into the news cycle after Vice President Kamala Harris’s claim that she worked at a Bay Area McDonald’s in 1983, which was met with doubts from Trump and his supporters.
McDonald’s corporate leadership sought to distance itself from the controversy and said that it does not endorse candidates for elected office. While the company couldn’t confirm Harris’s employment, it expressed pride in hearing about her fond memories of working there as a teen and extended an invitation to her and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, to visit one of its restaurants.
Meanwhile, Derek Giacomantonio, the franchisee who owns the location in Feasterville, released a statement and said that the fundamental value of his organization to open its doors to everyone who visits the community
“As a small, independent business owner, it is a fundamental value of my organization that we proudly open our doors to everyone who visits the Feasterville community,” Giacomantonio said
“That’s why I accepted former President Trump’s request to observe the transformative working experience that 1 in 8 Americans have had: a job at McDonald’s,” he added.
