In fact, perhaps the best-known case is Colorado’s Masterpiece bakery, which won a 2018 Supreme Court battle for refusing to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, after which it got pummeled by one-star reviews. Spamming a business with one-star reviews is not a new tactic. Earlier this month, Moe’s Cantina in Chicago’s River North neighborhood got spammed after it attempted to isolate vaccinated customers from unvaccinated ones. Attles in Seattle, which got an alert from Yelp after it made patrons show proof of vaccination at the door. The majority of those cases have been since May, like the gay bar C.C. “Since January 2021, we’ve placed more than 15 unusual activity alerts on business pages related to a business’s stance on covid-19 vaccinations,” said Malik. It’s a practice that Yelp has had to deploy more often over the course of the pandemic: According to Yelp's 2020 Trust & Safety Report, the company saw a 206% increase over 2019 levels in unusual activity alerts. “After we’ve seen activity dramatically decrease or stop, we will then clean up the page so that only firsthand consumer experiences are reflected,” she said in a statement. Noorie Malik, Yelp’s vice president of user operations, said Yelp has a “team of moderators” that investigate pages that get an unusual amount of traffic. Smith’s Yelp reviews were shut down after the sudden flurry of activity on its page, which the company labels “unusual activity alerts,” a stopgap measure for both the business and Yelp to filter through a flood of reviews and pick out which are spam and which aren’t. As pandemic restrictions have lifted, businesses like Mother’s Ruin have sought to ensure that safety by requiring proof of vaccination using state-sponsored apps like New York’s Excelsior Pass, vaccine passports, or simply flashing vaccine cards at the door - practices that have instigated a second surge of spam reviews. Throughout the pandemic, the tactic has also been deployed to attack bars and restaurants that enforced mask-wearing for safety. Spamming review portals with negative ratings is not a new phenomenon. Soon, his bar started receiving multiple one-star reviews on Yelp and Google Reviews from accounts as far away as Europe. It’s a name and shame campaign.” It wasn’t just the emails. “We started receiving hate mail through the Google portal,” Knapp says, estimating he’d received about a “few dozen” emails: “I’ve been called a Nazi and a communist in the same sentence. The Instagram post showing the sign (above) quickly went viral among European anti-vaxxers on Reddit.