No, of course not. But over the years I’ve heard tons of anecdotal and second-hand stories about yelp doing variations of this but nothing concrete or well-documented. That, and knowing that these kinds of scammers exist.
I ask this every time a Yelp story emerges: where is the evidence commensurate to the claim about Yelp’s reputation? It would make a fantastic news story, any reporter would leap at it, so where is it? Every time I ask this people “cite” Reddit and a bunch of blog posts, so I’m still waiting for evidence.
Now I don’t like Yelp. Fakespot often finds loads of fake reviews and that’s a problem, but one unrelated to Yelp’s social media “reputation.”