The Pennsylvania McDonald’s where police arrested the man suspected of gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has been flooded with negative reviews online since Monday, according to CNN.
Per the network, the Altoona, Pennsylvania, location where police detained Luigi Mangione is being smeared on Yelp and Google as employees are being branded “rats and snitches” by people unabashedly sympathetic to the 26-year-old’s alleged murder.
Police in New York believe Mangione gunned down Thompson a week ago and left the city. Investigators say the casings of the bullets used to kill the 50-year-old had the common health insurance industry denial jargon “deny, defend, depose” carved into them.
Mangione was detained Monday at the McDonald’s in Altoona when an alert customer and a quick-thinking employee called the police while Mangione was eating breakfast.
A ghost gun with a suppressor was said to have been found in his possession, along with thousands of dollars of cash. In the hours since the Altoona McDonald’s became part of the story, the restaurant had become the target of an online smear campaign, CNN reported on Tuesday.
Anchor Brianna Keilar noted the location had become a target of “review bombing” with comments referring to employees as “rats and snitches.”
Axios senior media correspondent Sara Fischer further explained to the network’s viewers:
Anywhere where you can leave a review about a business, they’re
going there. So it’s Google Reviews, it’s Yelp. They are mentioning to your point before that this person who called the police on the shooter is a “rat.”They’re making comments such as, “There’s rats in their kitchen. You can’t trust that you’re not going to get food poisoning there.” Now, the tech companies are put in a really precarious position here because in one end, you want to never meddle with reviews, right? You want them to be organic.But what Google and others are saying is that these aren’t real reviews. You’re not a customer coming in and checking out this restaurant. You’re just leaving a review to put a disparaging light on the business. And so they’re actually going and removing a lot of these reviews.Yelp has turned off comments, but what’s going to be challenging here, Boris, is this is really a game of whack-a-mole. You can try to delete as many comments as you want. If you’re eBay or Amazon, you can try to pull all the delay, deny, defend, depose merch as you want, but bad actors are still going to go out and continue to add it and continue to praise this shooter online.
One review left of the restaurant read, “This fast food restaurant houses a traitor among its employees&
Watch above via CNN.