Yelp, a platform dedicated to promoting restaurants through customer reviews and experiences, has just temporarily disabled reviews for the franchise of McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, where former President Donald Trump worked in the self-service area last Sunday.
Trump's participation was a carefully staged event by his campaign team at the Feasterville venue, a suburb north of Philadelphia, where the supposed customers were all people favorable to the Republican candidate and the restaurant was closed to the general public.
Comments in favor and against Trump
The supporters of the former president wrote in favor of him: "The best McDonald's I have been to in 47 years. The most senior employee was very kind. Make McDonald's great again! Bring back the one-dollar menu!". However, those comments were in the minority.
But the vast majority filled out the application with negative comments. "The fries were too salty, as if someone who had lost an important election had been crying over them for an hour," a user posted.
Another person wrote: "The person who was in the drive-thru vaguely resembled someone I saw in the news for being a convicted criminal."
"The customer service was a joke. An old senile man put sunscreen on my french fries, without using gloves. He repeated the same thing several times, something about Ronald McDonald in the golf club showers."
Yelp disabled the comments
"This business recently received increased public attention, which often means that people come to this page to share their opinions on the news," reads the alert. "While we do not take a stance on this incident, we have temporarily disabled content posting on this page while we work to investigate whether the content you see here reflects real consumer experiences rather than recent events."
This is not the first time that companies listed on Yelp have had to disable comments during political events because most of the time they are filled with negative reviews.