This is where the nuance of their scumminess comes in and where you're either ignoring or are ignorant of it. Yes, they can say that they're not "deleting" or "

This is where the nuance of their scumminess comes in and where you're either ignoring or are ignorant of it. Yes, they can say that they're not "deleting" or "altering" reviews because that's not what they're doing. What they're doing is sorting by "Yelp Sort" and listing "Recommended" reviews. If you look at any Yelp business page, you'll see a tiny little link at the bottom that says "See reviews that aren't Recommended". They claim that these reviews are hidden behind this wall because they're from users whose reviews are biased or who don't have enough patterns to be "trusted" but this is literally just their way of hiding the reviews that people don't pay for. Since every single one of those terms is subjective, they can change what constitutes a "recommended" review and be completely subjective about why one review is "trusted" and another isn't. It's completely up to them and they totally line up with whether or not a company pays for Yelp's "services". It's a lot like the BBB. No one has to pay to be listed by the BBB but you can pay for the BBB to "arbitrate" disputes between consumers and your business when someone posts a strike against you on their site. You're just paying for them to contact the customer and hide their bad review.