The article makes it pretty clear that the villian is Yelp (and Google Reviews, and Trustpilot etc). It's no different than any other social media moral hazard: Yelp makes money in spite of their being fraudulent reviews, and won't make the investment in cleaning it up.
> Dean said [Yelp's] notices validate her work, but also perfectly exemplify what she calls Yelp’s “whack-a-mole” approach ... she showed SFGATE several sketchy posts that she hasn’t mentioned in her videos — and which are still up and active.
> “I find it annoying, like, ‘You need me?’” she said. “... They’re a billion-dollar tech company that’s got teams of engineers and a trust and safety team.”
> ... Yelp said its automated recommendation software checked the 21 million reviews submitted last year for “quality, reliability and user activity” and had filed 75% into the “recommended” category, which are the reviews that figure most prominently on businesses’ pages and affect their star ratings. Of the remaining 25%, just 4% were removed by Yelp’s own moderators, 2% were removed by the reviewers themselves, and 19% were categorized as “not recommended reviews” — which don’t affect companies’ star ratings but are still accessible on businesses’ Yelp pages.
> In Dean’s mind, it’s not enough. She feels Yelp should better use account data to proactively identify problematic users and ban them altogether, and speculates that Yelp might be avoiding a crackdown on fake reviews because the positive boosts to businesses’ ratings might increase Yelp’s value to those businesses.
Given that this kind of problem is rampant across social media (where the platform is incentivized to promote horrible things, as we've seen with Meta, Insta, etc etc), it probably should be criminal if we ever want to erase this scourge. As the article shows, _businesses can't opt out from Yelp_ -- which is a pretty horrible state of affairs.