Providing Consumers with Reliable Information about Reproductive Health Services
Following the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the ability to access safe abortion care has become more limited for millions of women across the U.S. – making access to information about businesses that offer reproductive health services more important than ever. At Yelp, the trust and safety of our community is a top priority, which is why providing consumers with reliable and useful information to help inform their decisions is critical to our mission – this includes access to reliable information about reproductive health services.
Yelp has a consistent track record of supporting access to reproductive healthcare for our employees, underserved communities and our users. For years, we’ve invested in helping consumers find trusted information when seeking reproductive health care. And over the past several months, we’ve increased our efforts to protect our users and provide them with access to the information they’re looking for, which includes better matching them with reproductive health services that actually offer abortions when they are searching for abortion services and making it less likely they will see crisis pregnancy centers that don’t.
Updates to Consumer Notices for Crisis Pregnancy Centers
To provide consumers with helpful information when looking for reproductive health services, Yelp’s new consumer notice will appear on Crisis Pregnancy Centers’ business pages, informing consumers that businesses in those categories typically provide limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals onsite. Update as of February 2023: Since first publishing this blog post, we have updated the consumer notice that appears on business pages categorized as Crisis Pregnancy Centers to state that these businesses do not offer abortions or referrals to abortion providers.
This change helps us further maintain the quality and integrity of our content and better surface actual healthcare services that consumers may be looking for. It’s well-reported that crisis pregnancy centers do not offer abortion services, and it’s been shown that many provide misleading information in an attempt to steer people seeking abortion care to other options. With this new consumer notice we’re aiming to further protect consumers from the potential of being misled or confused.
Recategorizing Business Pages to Distinguish Healthcare Providers
Since 2018, Yelp’s moderators have manually evaluated tens of thousands of business listings and recategorized businesses that do not offer actual abortion services as Crisis Pregnancy Centers. To further demonstrate this commitment, we’re expanding our manual recategorization effort for those businesses. Our moderators conduct thorough investigations by scouring:
- Businesses’ websites
- Social media pages
- “About the Business” information contributed to Yelp by the businesses themselves
- Yelp reviews from consumers
Moderation Statistics and Future Commitments
We take transparency seriously, especially around sensitive healthcare decisions. These updates further demonstrate Yelp’s commitment to maintain the trust and safety of our users, and quality and integrity of the information we provide them. To summarize our recent progress:
- U.S. business pages proactively evaluated in 2022: nearly 33,500
- Business pages recategorized as Crisis Pregnancy Centers (as of Aug 8, 2022): nearly 470
- Total planned investigations across the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico: 55,000+
Yelp’s moderators are continuing these investigations in the coming months. We’ve continued to regularly audit and investigate these businesses to ensure we provide consumers with reliable and useful information to help inform their decisions.