Local businesses sometimes become newsworthy, often about something controversial. When this happens, people may come to the businesses' Yelp pages hoping to share their views through reviews, photos, or other content. These thoughts and comments may be interesting in the moment, but they typically don't reflect a personal consumer experience about the business.
In order to showcase those reviews that reflect actual first-hand consumer experiences, when a business gets unusual attention in the media we typically block users from posting content to the business for a period of time and place an alert on the business’s Yelp page to let Yelpers know what is happening. During this time, users are free to express their thoughts about the story through Yelp Talk, an open discussion forum. After we lift the block on a business’s page, we may continue to remove reviews and other content that appear to be motivated by the media coverage itself rather than first-hand customer experiences (even if it means removing points of view with which we might agree).
Please note that we apply this same policy regardless of the business and regardless of the topic at issue in order to avoid injecting our own varied viewpoints into the debate.