New York (CNN) — An influx of Yelp reviews – many of them bogus – of a Pennsylvania McDonald’s that former President Donald Trump visited Sunday, led the review platform to temporarily freeze the franchise’s Yelp page.
Many of the recent latest reviews were ruthless. Some called out Trump for his criminal record.
“Convicted felon sh*t-talking customers, especially women, did not wear gloves while preparing french fries, and only worked five minutes at a time before having to sit down or take a nap,” one said.
Others used the opportunity to take a different jab at the presidential candidate.
“The fries were too salty as if someone who lost a major election had been crying over them for an hour,” one review said.
Some users on Yelp blamed the McDonald’s franchise for allowing Trump to host a campaign event there.
“If you make managerial decisions this bad I certainly am never going to eat anything you make,” another review said.
Still, some on Yelp shrugged off the Trump campaign event.
“I’ve been to this MacDonalds long before Trump came by and I’ll keep coming by long afterwards,” one five-star review said.
McDonald’s was thrust into the political spotlight Sunday when Trump served fries at a Feasterville-Trevose, Pennsylvania, location, even though the chain attempted to distance itself from the stunt. Vice President Kamala Harris says she briefly worked at the chain during the summer of 1983 when she was still a student at Howard University in Washington, a claim Trump refutes without evidence.
Yelp will flag and temporarily disable reviews on businesses that have received increased public attention. In 2023, there were 986 total alerts placed on business pages related to the business receiving public attention, the company said. It’s removed almost 50,000 reviews as a result of these alerts.
“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,” a notice on the page said Tuesday.
Yelp said the disabled reviews are temporary, and confirmed it disabled reviews Monday.
“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,” Noorie Malik, Yelp’s VP of User Operations, said in a statement Tuesday.
Most of McDonald’s locations are independently owned and operated, meaning that although franchise owners have to agree to certain guidelines, they’re more or less free to invite whomever they want to run the drive-through.
On Sunday, McDonald’s said in an internal memo to employees obtained by CNN that it did not invite Trump.
“As we’ve seen, our brand has been a fixture of conversation this election cycle. While we’ve not sought this, it’s a testament to how much McDonald’s resonates with so many Americans,” the company said in its memo. “McDonald’s does not endorse candidates for elected office and that remains true in this race for the next President. We are not red or blue – we are golden.”
The company clarified in its memo that Derek Giacomantonio, the franchise’s owner and operator, was approached by local law enforcement about Trump’s desire to visit and Giacomantonio accepted.
“He was proud to highlight how he and his team serve their local community and make delicious food, like our World-Famous French Fries,” the company said. “Upon learning of the former President’s request, we approached it through the lens of one of our core values: we open our doors to everyone.”
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