Yelp temporarily disabled the reviews for the McDonald’s franchise in Pennsylvania where former President Donald Trump manned the french fry cooker and drive-thru window on Sunday after the app was flooded with negative comments by his political opponents.
Supporters of the former president wrote rave reviews. One of them commented: “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!”
But others flooded the page with one-star reviews and comments unrelated to the restaurant’s food or service.
“The fries were too salty as if someone who lost a major election had been crying over them for an hour,” one reviewer wrote in a post on Monday.
Another reviewer wrote: “The person who was at the drive through vaguely resembled someone who I saw on the news for being a convicted felon.”
“Customer service was a joke. Senile old man got bronzer on my fries, didn’t wear gloves. Repeated himself several times, something about Ronald McDonald in the showers at the golf club?” wrote another Yelp visitor.
A visit to the page yields a pop-up window titled “unusual activity alert.”
“This business recently received increased public attention, which often means people come to this page to post their views on the news,” the alert reads.
“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 is common for businesses listed on Yelp that have been mentioned in the context of political events to receive an overwhelming number of negative reviews from customers who did not legitimately patronize the establishment in question.
Yelp recently published a trust and safety report indicating that 112 business pages in the US received an unusual activity alert last year for incidents related to politics or political figures. The app ended up removing 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.
“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.”
Derek Giacomantonio, the franchisee who owns the location in Feasterville, released a statement on Monday saying: “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.”
“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,” Giacomantonio said.
The fast food chain’s corporate leadership on Sunday sought to distance itself from the controversy, saying that it “does not endorse candidates for elected office and that remains true in this race…”
McDonald’s was thrust into the news cycle after Trump and his supporters raised doubts as to whether his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, was truthful when she said that she worked at a Bay Area McDonald’s in 1983.
In its statement on Sunday, McDonald’s said it couldn’t necessarily confirm Harris ever took a job at one of its burger joints — but added it was “proud to hear” she had “fond memories” of working there as a teen.
The fast-food giant extended an invite to Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, to visit one of its restaurants “in order to share how McDonald’s provides meaningful pathways to economic opportunity and feeds and fosters local communities.”