Meet the New Boss...Same as the Old Boss, part 4

A Colombian journalist who criticizes the United States is denied a visa to enter the United States.

Can Yelp be trusted?

After I wrote my first Yelp review a few years ago, a review which I had put a lot of thought into, I found that it was mysteriously not showing up among the reviews for the service I reviewed. This seemed odd, so I dashed off a complaint to Yelp customer service. I received a canned reply that essentially blew me off. What I was told was that Yelp has some kind of automated process for filtering out reviews, and that there was nothing they were going to do about the fact that mine didn't make it through the filter.

Yelp claims that the automated process of filtering is a way of preventing companies from scamming the system by either planting shills or by writing malicious reviews of the competition. And while I understand the problem that they are trying to address, their solution to the problem does have the result that is a lot akin to being placed on the no-fly watch list by the TSA. Just as the TSA will say nothing about its procedures for putting people on their watch lists and offers no real means of appeal, Yelp will not publicize its algorithms for its filtering processes and offers you no means of appeal. The canned response I got back from Yelp illustrates the point--no matter how sincere you might be and how much thought you put into your review, Yelp simply doesn't care and will do nothing to help you.

Now consider this additional wrinkle to the problem. Yelp takes advertising from the very companies that people review, and even puts sponsored companies at the top of search results. If this seems to you like a potential conflict of interest, then you are not alone. Certainly newspapers print reviews all the time of restaurants and other businesses while at the same time taking advertising, so Yelp is hardly alone in this, but to even come close to making it work a lot of thought has to be put into drawing an ethical line of separation. Consumer Reports, for what it is worth, believes that no such line of separation is really possible, which is why they don't take any advertising at all. But if Yelp is going to take the path similar to that of the newspaper that takes advertising, then it would seem evident that they should make sure that there is not even the appearance impropriety. And that is something they have had trouble doing, given the lawsuits that have been filed against them in recent years.

The East Bay Express wrote an article last year accusing Yelp of engaging in outright extortion against businesses by telling them that whether they advertised with Yelp would influence the types of reviews that would pass or fail Yelp's filters. Whether or not this article is correct in its charges is not something I can say. Just this year, in response to a lawsuit, Yelp is now making available the reviews that it filters out, although you have to click a special link to see them and these filtered out reviews are not figured into the rating average.

The secret nature of the filtering still remains, however--Yelp insists that this is necessary so that companies cannot game the system. The fact remains, though that sincere reviewers will be thwarted by Yelp as a result of this process. And even if there is no hanky panky on the part of Yelp with respect to all of this, it still calls into question the legitimacy of the overall review ratings that viewers see.

A perusal of the reviews of one hotel in San Francisco shows what can result from this whole process. As of the time of this writing, the hotel in question has seven published reviews, and 10 reviews that are filtered out. In other words, a majority of the reviews for this hotel do not figure into the overall ratings. Of the the 10 reviews that are filtered out, eight of them are one-star reviews. That's correct-80% of the filtered out reviews give the lowest possible rating. These highly negative response from Yelp reviewers do not factor into the overall rating, which is 3.5 stars.

Yelp claims that reviewers who are not as established are typically the ones who are most likely to be filtered (thus Yelp admits that not just shills or malicious reviewers, but also legitimate reviewers are frequently filtered out if they happen to be new to the website.) The reality is that some people are driven to write Yelp reviews in the first place after having a very bad customer service experience and wanting to tell others about it. And it is precisely those reviewers who are most likely to have their reviews filtered out by the Yelp software.

So the question is--can Yelp be trusted? Or do you just take it all with a grain of salt? Yelp reviews are rarely consistent across the board--even the most popular and highly rated establishments often get very poor from the odd reviewer here and there. That being said, from now on, whenever one looks at Yelp, it wouldn't hurt to take the extra step of clicking through to the filtered reviews, just to see what is getting censored out of the rating process.

What is socialism, anyway?

In case anyone was wondering whether Obama is a socialist and wanted to know what socialism really is, this interview is a pretty good place to start:

Meet the New Boss...Same as the Old Boss, part 3

Meet the New Boss...Same as the Old Boss, part 2

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on a filmmaker who has been placed in that Kafkaesque world of the watch lists for flyers:

Nearly every time Poitras travels abroad - which is often - she's stopped on her departure or return by U.S. airport security, who subject her to tough questioning and have forced her to miss flights.

Of course, the most egregious aspect of this egregious assault on her civil liberties is that the US government won't actually admit that she is on any sort of list at all, which is par for the course.

We can take great satisfaction in Obama undid all the onerous assaults on human rights that the Bush regime instituted in the name of the war on terror. Oh wait...Never mind.

Not that this is surprising. Obama gave a clear clue before the election of his views on such matters as civil liberties and execute power when he voted for the FISA bill. But I am curious as to why so many liberals who were rightly outraged at Bush's egregious policies in the "war on terror" are willing to give Obama a pass when he continues those same policies.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! ran a story a few days ago about the Obama administration's role in the oil spill fiasco:

An extensive new investigation into the Obama administration’s handling of the BP oil spill disaster reveals that it was government mismanagement, delays and absence of oversight that allowed the crisis to spiral out of control. In the article "The Spill, the Scandal, and the President," Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson writes, "Though George W. Bush paved the way for the catastrophe, it was Obama who gave BP the green light to drill." Dickinson explores how Interior Secretary Ken Salazar kept in place the oil industry-friendly environmental guidelines that Bush had implemented and ultimately let BP, an oil company with the worst safety record, to get away with murder.

Dickinson in the interview points out that the Obama administration's role in this includes the following:

Ken Salazar, in the first year in office, put a record number—a record number of acres up for lease in the Gulf. So, while they were taking, you know, drilling out of view of national parks on land and scaling back the oil shale development, they were throttling up offshore oil drilling to record levels without doing the substantive reform that would have been required to make MMS something other than a candy store for the oil companies.

The fact that Obama was throttling up offshore oil drilling to record levels is not surprising--he had come out publicly in favor of more offshore drilling before this disaster hit.

Sierra Club

I resigned from the Sierra Club ten years ago and never looked back. I realized that, despite their reputation as a progressive environmentalist organization, they did not represent a truly independent and critical voice of environmental concerns; rather, I found that they were frequently in bed with too many political interests that tainted their objectivity. I found this devastating critique of the Sierra Club thus to be completely on target, and I was glad to hear that I was not the only one who felt this way about that organization.