Yelp Forced to Reveal Anonymous Reviewers

Good idea...

From CAPhouse:

…there is not a requirement that someone leaving a review actually use the business. What would prevent me from leaving a review based on what I know versus experienced first-hand? Maybe I want to prevent other people from making what I think is a mistake using their service.

One of Yelp’s review guidelines is this:

Personal experience: We want to hear about your firsthand consumer experience, not what you heard from your co-worker or significant other. Try to tell your own story without resorting to broad generalizations and conclusory allegations.

That doesn’t sound like a strict requirement to me though. I also looked through their Terms of Service and didn’t find anything that specifically says that you have to have used the business to write a review. It’s supposedly in there, but I didn’t find it.

Some more details about the case.

The case
The business owner, after becoming suspicious that some of the negative reviews were not from actual customers (by allegedly checking their own customer database), asked Yelp to turn over the identifying information of the reviewers.

The owner’s lawyers subpoenaed the consumer review website for the identities of the seven reviewers in question in order to pursue individual defamation suits.

According to Yelp’s Terms of Service, reviewers must have been actual customers of the business to leave a review.

Yelp did not respond to the repeated request related to these seven reviews, and was actually held in contempt of court for not responding as required by law.

The lack of response led to pursuit of a court case. The initial ruling judge found that Yelp must comply with the request, which was then appealed to the Virginia Court of Appeals.

The appeal

The appeal was denied in a 2-1 decision requiring Yelp to turn over the identities of these seven reviewers. The court actually made a wider ruling that stated user generated “comments were not protected First Amendment opinions.”

In the majority decision, Judge William Petty emphasized that the underlying problem is that Yelp does not provide any direct verification of actual patronage of a business by a reviewer:

An internet user does not shed his free speech rights at the log-in screen. Generally, a Yelp review is entitled to First Amendment protection because it is a person’s opinion about a business that they patronized. The anonymous speaker has the right to express himself on the Internet without the fear that his veil of anonymity will be pierced for no other reason than because another person disagrees with him.

But this general protection relies upon an underlying assumption of fact: that the reviewer was a customer of the specific company and he posted his review based on his personal experience with the business.

If this underlying assumption of fact proves false, in that the reviewer was never a customer of the business, then the review is not an opinion; instead, the review is based on a false statement of fact – that the reviewer is writing his review based on personal experience. And ‘there is no constitutional value in false statements of fact.’

The biggest problem with review sites like Yelp and Tripadvisor is that there is no verification that the reviewer has ever been a customer of the business they’re reviewing. We have discussed the negative impact of this at great length in this forum.

With the precedent set by this court decision, legislation may follow that will require review sites to verify patronage. I think that would be a great thing for the businesses that are being reviewed and also for the customers who trust the reviews they read. Perhaps John’s suggestion will soon become a reality.