Courts Say Businesses Can’t Censor Yelp Reviews

You'd think something like this would be common sense but apparently it took the Supreme Court of Virginia getting involved to clear things up.

“The decision confirms the importance of not shutting down public discussion on the Internet just because someone doesn’t like what’s being talked about,” said Paul Alan Levy, an attorney for Public Citizen. “Review sites like Yelp are vehicles for the free flow of ideas by helping consumers make informed decisions on how to spend their hard-earned dollars.”

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"Review sites like Yelp are vehicles for the free flow of ideas by helping consumers make informed decisions on how to spend their hard-earned dollars."

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Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. This is untrue of Yelp.

too bad Yelp is such a worthless heap of trash for legitimate reviews. every place I've gone to that is supposed to be horrible, a health hazard and an abomination before God according to the "reviewers", is actually a very nice place that serves very good food.

SamuraiInBlack said:

too bad Yelp is such a worthless heap of trash for legitimate reviews. every place I've gone to that is supposed to be horrible, a health hazard and an abomination before God according to the "reviewers", is actually a very nice place that serves very good food.

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You been to a doctor lately?

It works both ways too. I've eaten at a few places that had great reviews only to have horrible experiences. I think that some of the reviews on some of those sites are written by employees and family members.

The BBB used to be a legitimate site to file grievances but if you have a bad review and pay them cash, they will remove it.

Yelp imo is a bit diiferent. One, its a place to go to complain, so the majority of legit reviews are negative. Two, its practically anonymous so if you own a business you can pump up your good reviews.

Angies list while a slight bit more legit than others, requires a fee or membership to review companies. They also accept money from companies being reviewed to place them higher in searches so just like a politician, they accept bribes.

I rely on word of mouth on where I go to eat. Places like Yelp have burned me before I realized its the biggest, heaping, pile of shit to rely on. Whats the point if you are always questioning if a certain review is either a competing company or a random account of the companies to talk them up?

I keep hearing that if your business pays Yelp that Yelp will then put the higher-rated reviews at the top. Sounds like they're not to be taken seriously.

Oh come on, Yelp is complete, contrived bullshit anyway.

Yelp has removed the majority of negative reviews that I have seen others write.

You can easily tell the fake positive reviews on Yelp and Angies List though.

Been in retail for nearly 20 years. 90% of people who have had a bad experience will tell others about it while only 10% of people who had a good experience will tell others.

ninjaturtle said:

Been in retail for nearly 20 years. 90% of people who have had a bad experience will tell others about it while only 10% of people who had a good experience will tell others.

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Indeed. When I worked retail through college, my manager would always bug us about the current review scores that we were getting, and tell us we needed to get them up. The problem is, if you have a good experience you probably are just going to go on your way and enjoy whatever you purchased. If you have a bad experience, you tend to want to tell people about it. Because of that, the vast majority of the people that actually submitted reviews were the people that had something to complain about. Even though, in reality, these people made up a very small portion of our total customer base.

That is *not* what the court said.

The court said that it is improper to issue a preliminary injunction barring the reviews since :

A.The allegations untruthfulness hasn't been yet established (in the US, the burden of proof is on the person making the libel/slander accusation to prove that it is false).
B.That equitable relief (non-monetary compensation like injunctions, estoppel, specific performance) is inappropriate because adequate remedy at law (monetary compensation) is available to compensate for the extended time the review remains up.

Typically, in order to get a preliminary injunction you have to demonstrate the following (varies by state) :

1.Your case is likely to succeed on the merits.
2.You would suffer irreparable harm if the actions of the respondent are not immediately stopped.
3.The amount of harm you would suffer is greater than the amount of harm that would be inflicted on the other party by the injunction (assuming they are innocent and the injunction is later lifted).
4.The preliminary injunction is in the public interest

The case is now on its way back to the lower court (court of original jurisdiction). That court will act as a fact finder (appeals courts, with the exception of Louisiana, which uses civil rather than common law, do not deal in fact, only matters of law) and will determine, possibly with the help of a jury, if the statements are untrue, viewing the evidence presented by the plaintiff in the light most favorable to the defendant. If the statements are determined to be libelous, the court could very well still order the review taken down (normally, malice also has to be demonstrated in order to succeed in a libel case but certain categories of libel/slander (allegations of a crime of moral turpitude, allegations of a loathsome disease, allegations of unchastity, and allegations injurious to trade or business) are known as defamation per se and are automatically assumed to be malicious.)

timta2 said:

It works both ways too. I've eaten at a few places that had great reviews only to have horrible experiences. I think that some of the reviews on some of those sites are written by employees and family members.

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That and negative reviews written by competing businesses.

However, they can censor google results.

Steve said:

You'd think something like this would be common sense but apparently it took the Supreme Court of Virginia getting involved to clear things up.

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Except that's not what they are saying.

The libel case continues, and the contractor may very well win it.

The ruling simply states that a preliminary injunction (a ruling while waiting for the final resolution of the case) can't be used for libel cases.

I'm really on the side of the contractor here, looks like he is dealing with a real psycho customer. If you read the attached legal documents, it looks something like this:

1.) Contractor did work at the owners house

2.) Owner insisted that contractor do work not included in the contract for free.

3.) Contractor refused

4.) Owner locked contractor out of job site and refused to pay for work done.

5.) Contractor filed suit against owner for payment.

6.) While contractor was out of town, owner filed for a judgement on a paperwork error and won. Contractor had 10 days to appeal, but since he was out of town, he missed the deadline.

7.) Owner proceeds to slander contractor on sites like Yelp and Angieslist.

So not only is the contractor out the money for the job due to a shitty legal maneuver on the part of the owner, but now he's having a tough time getting more work in an already tough market due to the slanderous remarks the owner has made online.

It's really quite shitty.

The contractor filed for, and the original Judge in the case granted a preliminary injunction prohibiting the online reviews from being displayed until the Libel case had been settled, so that the contractors livelihood wasn't impacted while the case progressed, but it turns out you can't use preliminary injunctions in Libel cases, and that's the only thing that was ruled on by the Virginia supreme court here.

I sincerely hope the contractor not only wins his case, but gets a cash settlement to cover him for the work he did, and the difficulty in getting work due to the woman's slanderous online comments.

timta2 said:

It works both ways too. I've eaten at a few places that had great reviews only to have horrible experiences. I think that some of the reviews on some of those sites are written by employees and family members.

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But that's not the case here.

There HAVE been legal cases to stop legitimate bad reviews, and many (particularly doctors offices) get around this by sneaking an agreement not to give poor reviews into that stack of paper you sign when you first become a patient, which is really shitty.

Most people - and typically the law - that a legitimate bad review should be off limits for any kind of legal action.

Where this case comes in is when a psycho customer (or a competitor or anyone else) intentionally posts false information online in order to hurt the livelihood of someone else. That is a legitimate case of libel/slander and a legitimate use of the courts to try to stop it.

Anyone see the Kitchen Nightmares episode where the owner is convinced Yelpers are giving him bad reviews for no reason, and his food and service have nothing to do with it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS_umnHSSDs

The truth is an absolute defense against slander or libel.

I've dealt with customers like this woman, and it really seems like she was trying to finagle free labor out of this guy by using the payment of the contract as a carrot on a stick. You see it a lot in any service industry where payment on completion is the norm. They all get very angry if you actually stick to your guns, too.

There's a sort of person whose sense of entitlement is so great that they really convince themselves that you screwed them over no matter what the contract actually says, and this sort of mentality is typified by spurious claims like jewelry theft. They're flailing around trying to get you for anything they can.

There's literally nothing you can do about people like this. It's simply the belief that, if they were trying to take advantage of you, then YOU must be trying to take advantage of THEM.

The question I always have to ask myself with sites like Yelp is this: what's to stop business owners/employees from running around and positing disingenuous (negative) reviews on their competitors in the hopes of indirectly steering more business their own way? A few aliases, alternate accounts, proxy servers and away you go . . .

az_max said:

Anyone see the Kitchen Nightmares episode where the owner is convinced Yelpers are giving him bad reviews for no reason, and his food and service have nothing to do with it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS_umnHSSDs

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First thing I thought of when I saw this thread haha. Fake feedback has been an issue for as long as reviews have been kept, but thankfully most of them are pretty obvious. When I was in Mississippi, I wish I'd checked the reviews at yelp before I'd gone to a few restaurants in the area because the yelp reviews were pretty much spot on.

One of the best ways I have seen business deal with bad reviews is by addressing the customer/whiner/bipolar nutjob directly on the site when the complaint is logged for all to see. This gives a sense of "this company cares about me" and makes my buying decision easier. I see it on Newegg all the time where some person will complain and give one star to a product and complain. The seller and/or manufacturer can reply to the person directly and try to rectify the situation.

Having said this, you can't please everybody. Some folks will complain regardless and its just doesn't make business sense to keep trying. Sprint a few years back dropped a bunch of folks because they were calling too much. At some point a business needs to reconized that perhaps they cannot meet the customers needs or their demands.

Extra-Titanian said:

First thing I thought of when I saw this thread haha. Fake feedback has been an issue for as long as reviews have been kept, but thankfully most of them are pretty obvious. When I was in Mississippi, I wish I'd checked the reviews at yelp before I'd gone to a few restaurants in the area because the yelp reviews were pretty much spot on.

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The problem is when you're looking at scores, and not reading individual reviews.

If a product on amazon for example has 238 reviews, no one is going to take the time to read that many reviews, so all you have time for is to see the "general consensus" and if that is screwed up by fake reviews its worse than worthless.

Oh another trick I've seen btw is for manufacturers to decontent a product AFTER its initial release.

This way all of the official reviewers and google search results and initial user reviews are all favorable, but then they do a little switcheroo to cheapen it, and no one is the wiser that this product isn't the same as the one initially reviewed since the model # and everything is the same.

I've seen this on everything from a tire inflator/gauge unit (after initial reviews it got a cheaper gauge and nylon instead of premium rubber hose) to an air-purifier (no more remote control/removed options/different filters/etc) to LCD screens (where the actual panel inside has changed to a cheaper unit).

Ducman69 said:

The problem is when you're looking at scores, and not reading individual reviews.

If a product on amazon for example has 238 reviews, no one is going to take the time to read that many reviews, so all you have time for is to see the "general consensus" and if that is screwed up by fake reviews its worse than worthless.

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A great example.

I was one of many people who tried to purchase an HP TouchPad during the firesale. I was one of the few that succeeded. I made my purchase via a store known as "OnSale".

Now everyone knows the debacle of the Touchpad sale...what wasn't that widely noticed by those not purchase is how seller OnSale handled their mess...They literally turned off their entire corporate public phone tree. They didn't answer emails about it. The only updates on the situation came from the CEO occasionally posting updates on the corporate Facebook page. PR utter Fail. This bad PR handling miffed lots of people understandably who were already pissed off...and the negative reviews on Amazon started coming in like a deluge from a hurricane.

Note how I said "known as OnSale". Within a month of the immediate debacle, OnSale rebranded itself to get rid of all the negative reviews.



There's an entire system out there to gaming online reviews. And those being reviewed know all the tricks to gaming Amazon or the BBB.

The courts need not worry about censoring Yelp reviews; Yelp already does it on their own.