Do Black‐Owned Restaurants Matter?: Yelp and Platform Visibility amid a Racial Reckoning

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn Spring 2020, the murder of George Floyd catalyzed calls for racial justice across the United States, ushering in a series of organizational and institutional responses. One response from Yelp, a popular review‐based platform, included its addition of a searchable Black‐owned attribute, a tag intended to signal its solidarity with Black businesses and communities. Analyzing a repository of over 300,000 Yelp reviews from Black and non‐Black‐owned restaurants in Los Angeles, CA, USA and Detroit, MI, USA, we pose the question: How did the addition of the Black‐owned tag impact the online reputation of Los Angeles and Detroit Black‐owned restaurants on Yelp? To examine this, we use restaurant review counts and average star ratings as proxy measures for online reputation and track these metrics over the year following the platform design intervention. We find that the addition of the Black‐owned tag did not create positive, sustainable change for Los Angeles and Detroit Black‐owned restaurants. In all, we call attention to the disparate impacts of platform design features on users and communities, especially for Yelp and digital platforms seeking to effect racial justice through novel platform design interventions.