Google late Monday yanked a slew of scathing write-ups that “review bombed” the McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa., where an employee alerted authorities to the location of the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
No sooner had authorities swooped in to pick up 26-year-old Luigi Mangione on Monday — after the employee called police upon recognizing him from photos released by the NYPD — than reviews referencing rodents and snitches proliferated online.
“This location has rats in the kitchen that will make you sick and your insurance isn’t going to cover it,” read one such review that was captured by Reuters before it got deleted.
It was typical of the comments that flooded not just the specific McDonald’s the employee worked in, but others in the same city, according to Axios.
Google pulled the negative reviews, while Yelp disabled them with an accompanying pop-up message. The most recent review on Google is now a week old.
“These reviews violate our policies and have been removed,” a Google spokesperson told Reuters in a statement, adding that reviews “should reflect a genuine experience at a place or business.”
Yelp had a similar message, though left existing reviews intact.
“This business recently received increased public attention, which often means people come to this page to post their views on the news,” Yelp’s pop-up said. “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.”
The site added that the policy for disabling new content applies regardless of the business or the topic involved.
“My nuggets also looked like they fried a rat,” read a one-star Yelp review posted Monday that’s still on the site. “I tried to use the bathroom before I left, and there were rat droppings and a big hole in the restroom where the rat can get in and get out easily.”
“Major rat problem, especially behind the counter, and employees ruin things for everyone,” read another.
Even before he was named, arrested and charged with murder, Mangione had tapped into collective rage at the healthcare machine, which many feel seems bent on denying innocent Americans life-saving coverage.
Laughing emojis abounded on social media, and further furor erupted when the words “delay,” “deny” and “depose” — shorthand for what patients allege insurance companies do to cut costs at the expense of their health — were found written on the bullets shot at Thompson.
Mangione also wrote a manifesto criticizing “corporate America” and saying that although he was sorry for any pain he had caused, “these parasites had it coming.”
At his extradition hearing on Tuesday, Mangione lashed out, calling the charges an “insult to the intelligence of the American people.”
With News Wire Services
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