Yelp will flag off a list of crisis pregnancy centers to avoid misleading abortion seekers

Wade, Yelp announced Tuesday that it will be adding a new consumer notice to distressed pregnancy centers to better differentiate them from clinics that provide abortion services.

Starting today, faith-based and non-faith-based distress pregnancy centers will appear at the top of listings in Yelp's new Notices app, as previously reported by Axios. The new feature prominently displays a warning that informs users that these centers "generally provide limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals."

Since 2018, Yelp says it has reclassified "thousands" of business listings that may mislead abortion seekers into seeking care online. Crisis pregnancy centers often market themselves online as "clinics" for pregnant people seeking abortion care. While some of these crisis centers offer limited medical services (such as STI testing), in general, their primary goal is to discourage people from terminating a pregnancy.

Yelp's vice president of user operations, Noori Malik, wrote in a Tuesday blog post, "Crisis pregnancy centers do not offer abortion services, and it has been shown that there have been several attempts to move people seeking abortion care to other options." Huh." Provide misleading information." "With this new consumer notice we are aiming to further protect consumers from the possibility of being misled or misled."

The Yelp announcement follows the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade in June, which effectively bans the long-standing federal right to abortion. Following the decision, tech companies such as Google announced new efforts to combat abortion-related misinformation online. In July, YouTube said it would remove "Unsafe Abortion Methods Instructions". TikTok introduced a similar policy shortly after.

But these moderation policies do not change companies' ability to protect user data. Earlier this month, Motherboard reported that Facebook shut down private messages, later blamed for illegal abortions of a Nebraska mother and daughter. That case confirmed warnings from abortion and privacy experts, who have sounded the alarm for years that ongoing digital surveillance on social media could aid in the criminalization of abortion care.

In its Tuesday blog post, Yelp said its Crisis Pregnancy Center audit is ongoing. “We continue to regularly audit and investigate these businesses – in 2022 alone, we evaluated approximately 33,500 US business pages and by 2022 approximately 470 business pages at Crisis Pregnancy Centers or faith-based Crisis Pregnancy Centers (August 8, 2016) 2016)". Malik said.