The Unintended Costs of Platform Interventions: Black-Owned Restaurants and Yelp Reputation

In Spring 2020, digital review-based platform Yelp added the searchable “Black-owned” attribute to support Black-owned businesses. Based on the literature, the impacts of this design intervention were mixed. As such, we sourced an original dataset of 250,000+ Yelp reviews from Black and non-Black-owned restaurants in Detroit and Los Angeles. Performing statistical and trend analyses, we compared the reputation metrics of Black-owned restaurants to their non-Black-owned counterparts before and after the intervention. Although Yelp reported positive impacts, our results contribute to the growing evidence of the harms and unintended costs of platform interventions. Specifically, while awareness of Black ownership and the number of Black-owned restaurant reviews increased, assumedly among and by Yelp’s predominately non-Black users, Black-owned restaurants saw a decline in average star ratings. Altogether, the findings highlight the need to interrogate underlying assumptions in the design process, integrating critical race concepts to better contextualize and evaluate interventions targeting marginalized users.