As hate spreads online, businesses get caught in the firing line

Business owners of Asian descent face the largest increase in racist reviews of business services among all ethnic groups in the United States, and experts said this anti-Asian sentiment can damage minority-owned businesses.

Online review platform Yelp said recently that it removed more than 2,000 hateful or racist business reviews last year. Among them, 475 were left for Asian-owned businesses, 320 reviews for black-owned businesses and 800 for Latinx-owned businesses.

Asian-owned businesses were the subject of the biggest rise in such reviews, compared with black-owned and Latinx-owned businesses, said the San Francisco company, which published its annual trust and safety report last week.

In 2021, Yelp said it removed only nine posts that included anti-Asian hate.

Cynthia Choi, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and co-executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, read the Yelp report and said it actually did not surprise her at all. "It's very consistent with what we've been tracking, which includes online hate and racist rhetoric," Choi said.

Nearly 11,500 anti-Asian hate incidents were reported to Stop AAPI Hate's reporting center between March 19, 2020, and March 31, 2022. Two in three of those incidents involved harassment, such as verbal or written hate speech or inappropriate gestures.

"It's very disheartening. Many small businesses were hit hard, but especially Asian businesses that saw a drop in business because COVID was racialized," she said.

A "disturbing pattern" emerged between the racist and xenophobic rhetoric used by former president Donald Trump, such as calling COVID-19 "kung flu" and "the Chinese virus", and a number of policies and efforts to target AAPI communities, such as depicting Chinese researchers and students as spies.

Yelp first began tracking racial hate speech on its platform in 2020, as Asian Americans experienced a rise in racially motivated hatred related to COVID-19. That year, the platform started allowing businesses to specify that their owners were Asian, black or Latinx.

Christopher Wong, who owns Curry Up Cafe in suburban Los Angeles, told The Associated Press that he was a victim of racist reviews on Yelp.

"I will not have my dog eat in this place because they might cook him," a Yelp review of Wong's eatery read. "The owner works for the Chinese government."

Worries voiced

Yelp deleted the review after Wong and several regular customers complained. However, he was worried that the review had deterred some potential customers from patronizing his establishment.

"If one person read that and decided not to come in, that's someone who could have been a satisfied customer for years," Wong told The Associated Press.

Asian American businesses were hit particularly hard during the pandemic because many of them were small businesses in industries that were susceptible to being harmed by COVID-19, including hospitality and leisure, retail, and other services such as hair and nail salons.

An increase in anti-Chinese sentiment has led to consumer discrimination against Asian American-owned small businesses, according to a study by the University of Michigan researchers that was published in Nature Human Behavior last month.

In the wake of the pandemic, politicians' stigmatizing language, media outlets' dehumanizing images of Asians and increasing anti-Asian hate crimes have played a harmful role, said the researchers, who used restaurants to study the economic effects of this bias. The study found that Asian restaurants experienced a drop in patronage of 18.4 percent on average relative to comparable non-Asian restaurants in the same areas during the pandemic.

An 18 percent drop cost Asian restaurants about $7.42 billion in revenue in 2020, which is "a large impact for a large swath of small businesses", the researchers said.

Furthermore, the researchers pointed to Trump's role in this phenomenon. In areas where Trump support was more than 75 percent, relative avoidance was as high as 30 percent. In low Trump support areas, that relative avoidance was less than 10 percent.

Agencies contributed to this story.