Walter Palmer killed one of Zimbabwe's most beloved lions. And now he must face the wrath of the Internet.
Today, new reports fingered Palmer, a Minnesota dentist, as one of the hunters who killed, decapitated, and skinned a beloved lion named Cecil on the African plains. Palmer, who told the Star Tribune that he believed that he was acting legally, already has one poaching conviction on his record, according to reports. It's unclear whether he could be extradited to Zimbabwe to face poaching charges, but anyone involved in the crime could face up to 10 years in prison, according to the Independent.
But the Internet has already delivered its punishment. People are flooding the Yelp and Facebook pages for Palmer's dental practice with negative reviews and comments referring to the lion's death. At one point, the only five star review on the front page of his Yelp profile read "He killed Simba. So here's a song for Dr. LionKiller," linking to a YouTube clip to the dentist song from the movie Little Shop of Horrors. One comment summed up this enormous online attack: "You kill a protected lion, we kill your shitty business :)"
This is what the Internet does. It rises up to punish evildoers. And while internet vigilantism is more associated with Reddit and 4chan than with online review sites, Yelp and its peers are becoming a battleground in the culture wars. And that might not be a good thing, whatever you think of Walter Palmer. Not everyone, after all, agrees on who is or isn't evil.
It's hard to find much sympathy for poachers willing to shell out $50,000 to kill an endangered animal. No, scratch that. It's impossible to find any sympathy. But the speed with which social media sites can sink a business is disconcerting. This time around the crowd might be protesting a business whose owner's actions are morally reprehensible, but next time, the ire of the Internet could come down on someone you admire.
Yes, Palmer's case is exceptional because it's receiving international media and his alleged actions anger both liberal environmentalists and conservative sportsmen alike. In other cases, controversy will likely lead to good and bad reviews evening each other out.
Earlier this year, when the owner of Memories Pizza in Indiana told reporters that the business wouldn't cater gay weddings, its Yelp page was flooded with comments both supporting and condemning the business, and the company was able to raise over $800,000 through a GoFundMe page to help it offset any damages from negative reviews. But that's not always going to be the case for every target.
The massive "Gamer Gate" campaign last year, during which many prominent women in the videogame industry were targeted for online harassment, is an example of the way internet mobs can turn people's lives upside down. Even if Gamer Gate represented only a minority of internet users, its adherents were able to drive women out of their homes through online threats, and make it difficult for gaming professionals to maintain public profiles without being inundated with threats and insults. Many Gamer Gate victims turned to crowd funding campaigns for financial support, but the damage done to their careers and the emotional distress caused is irreparable.
Yelp wasn't really a battle ground during the Gamer Gate fiasco, but it represents a quick way to damage the livelihood of a target since online reviews have become a crucial part of any local business. And while Yelp does have filters in place to spot fake reviews, Palmer's case reveals how easy it is to get past them.
Yelp says that the protest reviews posted to Palmer's profiles violate its terms of service and will be removed. "Media-fueled reviews typically violate our Content Guidelines," a spokesperson told us in an email. "One of these deals with relevance. For example, reviews aren't the place for rants about a business's employment practices, political ideologies, extraordinary circumstances, or other matters that don't address the core of the consumer experience. Yelp reviews are required to describe a firsthand consumer experience, not what someone read in the news."
The problem is that it's hard to verify the legitimacy of reviews, and while most of the current rash of reviews are clearly politically motivated, there's an ongoing campaign to discredit the business. Today, the Memories Pizza place still has plenty of both positive and negative reviews on its page, but it's impossible to suss out which ones are earnest reviews and which are ideological, even though few now reference their owners' earlier statements. Palmer's pages will likely be haunted by similar reviews for months or years to come.
And while Palmer may deserve to lose business, the next target could be gay business owners, businesses owned by women who have provoked the wrath of Gamer Gate, or some other politically charged targets of the right or left. The politicization of Yelp reviews is probably just a start.
Correction 6/28/2015 6:30 PM ET: An earlier version of this article described Cecil as endangered. Although the US Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed listing the African lion as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, it is not currently considered an endangered species.
