After an Indiana pizza shop told a TV station that it would "say no" to certain gay customers once the state's new Religious Freedom Restoration Act went into effect in July, Yelp users responded by posting over 1,900 reviews condemning the shop's statement.

The backlash, largely full of one-star reviews, began on Tuesday night after Memories Pizza made a statement to an Indiana ABC affiliate about the bill that Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed into law last week. “If a gay couple came in and wanted us to provide pizzas for their wedding, we would have to say no,” shop co-owner Crystal O'Connor said.

Before Memories Pizza had made such an SB 101 statement—and became the first Indiana business to do so, at that—the shop only had two Yelp reviews to its name (one of which had been filtered out of normal results due to it possibly sounding disingenuously positive).

Reviews came largely from users whose cities of origin weren't near the town of Walkerton, Indiana, but Yelp's well-known filtering system had only cast aside roughly 773 reviews as of press time. That's possibly because many of the reviews came from longtime, reputable Yelp users—including over a dozen "elite" accounts—as opposed to being carpetbombed solely by anonymous or brand-new accounts.

While a minority of Memories Pizza reviewers praised the shop's decision and gave out five-star reviews, other users posted sarcastic, higher-star reviews with sexual and homoerotic comments that ranged from coy to outright vulgar—complete with stories about "sausage pizza," "dripping sauce," and so on. That criticism has spread beyond Yelp, as well; in particular, the domain memoriespizza.com, which was registered today, currently hosts a satirical page about the restaurant.

The last time Yelp dealt with nationwide outrage expressed via reviews on its site—specifically, at an apartment complex that asked residents not to post reviews—the site responded once the dust settled by outright deleting suspicious reviews, as opposed to funneling them into the page's "not currently recommended" section of reviews.

When asked about review filters, including the possibility of a "locals only" filter in the future, a Yelp spokesperson replied with a statement: "Non-germane, media-fueled reviews typically violate our Content Guidelines," they wrote. "Although most instances like these do not reach the current level of scrutiny and media attention, Yelp has proven policies in place to deal with such events and will remove content that violates our Terms of Service, including reviews that only attack a business’s political ideologies."