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Appeals Court Clears Yelp of Extortion Claims
jfruh writes A U.S. appeals court cleared Yelp of charges of extortion related to its interaction with several small businesses who claim Yelp demanded that they pay for advertising or face negative reviews. While Yelp says it never altered a business rating for money, the court's finding was instead based on a strict reading of the U.S. extortion law, classifying Yelp's behavior as, at most, "hard bargaining." Interestingly, the EFF supported Yelp here, arguing that "Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) protects online service providers from liability and lawsuits over user-generated content, except in very narrow circumstances where the providers created or developed content themselves. In its amicus brief, EFF argued that mere conjecture about contributing content – like there was in this case – is not enough to allow a lawsuit to go forward."
Sure wouldn't want something to happen to it.... like no customers showing up again, ever!
"unless a person has a pre-existing right to be free of the threatened economic harm, threatening economic harm to induce a person to pay for a legitimate service is not extortion," appeals court judge Marsha Berzon wrote in the decision."
So apparently nobody has pre-existing right to be free of smear campaign on Yelp.
As much as I think Yelp are a bunch of abhuman bottom feeders who would do the world a favor if they caught fire, I am pleased by this one.
Section 230 is a vital defense against a truly hellish legal climate on the internet, and I'd hate to see it be chipped away during a fight against an unsympathetic defendant.
Yelp used to be my go-to app for restaurant reviews when in another city, but I find the quality of content on it has gone WAY downhill with things being very stale. While on a recent vacation, on THREE separate occasions Yelp sent me to a store that was closed, some of them for months.
Personally, I have switched to the Tripadvisor app, where I find the content is much more highly curated and the community is much more active.
Who could even trust a company that has no bad reviews? I find it impossible for any establishment to be universally liked, even if the sample group is only people who would both go to that business and post on Yelp.
Personally, the bad reviews are where I look to find out the worst parts of a product or business, and if their worst parts aren't really so bad then I'm more likely to buy.
I support a business who has been targeted by yelp, and it's not pleasant. I can't prove anything, but shortly after turning the abusive sales troll down, we started getting negative reviews. Look up the users making the reviews, and it seems they have a history of making negative reviews. What's more, most reviews were factually and demonstrably inaccurate. We couldn't find any of these users in our system, so we knew they weren't customers.
Now sure, they could have been normal trolls out to do what trolls do, but it just seemed too coincidental that they started popping up after we turned down a business relationship with yelp. Meanwhile, our customers' positive reviews would often never show up on yelp due to their algorithm.
The obvious solution to this entire headache is to dissuade family and friends from using yelp, spread the word far and wide that they are dishonest in their policies and that companies can pay for reviews. As "family IT", we have far more authority than yelp could ever hope for.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
In Europe those pre-existing rights (we call them Human Rights) don't get washed away simply because it's a business doing the threatening instead of a government.
PS: "2077. My time. My city. My family" is supposed to be fiction not some goal to work towards.
Not extortion, no siree!
The Mob is actually a benevolent society, concerned about the well being of local businesses.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Nice business you got there.
Sure would be a shame if a load of negative reviews on our website cost you all your customers.
For a perfectly reasonable fee, we can protect you from that. Whaddayasay?
If Yelp has salespeople it's very easy to see that the salespeople have a motivation to punish businesses that don't play ball and they can do it without involving Yelp-the-company at all, by either doing it themselves or by farming it out if they worry about it getting linked back to them.
This seems to be one of those "plausible deniability" kind of rackets where the company has sales people who only get paid if they make sales and an official policy against doing something shady to obtain those sales, yet its well understood among the sales people that they should do X.
It also reminds me of the way Walmart exploits hourly workers -- the store manager is held to some financial goal. The corporation has a policy against making employees work off the clock, but it's a policy enforced at the store level by store managers. All Walmart has to do is squeeze the manager with financial targets he can only reach by ripping off employees.
My neighbor runs a small mom/pop type restaurant and he gets called about once a month by a yelp representative. He's got plenty of positive reviews on Yelp, but what they tell him is that if he pays yelp, they'll move the negative ones to the "not recommended reviews" list. Normally the only way to see this list is to scroll to the bottom and see a light grey link.
How is this any different from what the mafia did with it's "Pay for protection" schemes...?
If they don't change this, I'll give the US legal system a bad review
Despite repeated contact, they still list several places in my town as open when they are permanently closed. In one case, the building is ever gone. Yelp just isn't as useful as it used to be.
Do you want proactive insurance or reactive insurance? The mob sells the former. You pay to prevent something bad from happening. If you pay enough your competition might even leave town. There is the long term issue where the mob completely takes over your business. This reminds me of in the Godfather the Godfather says "A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns."
A friend of mine used to work at Yelp When he did, I asked him about this. (Accusations of cooked yelp reviews are far from a recent development.) For whatever itâ(TM)s worth⦠but I have no reason to suspect he was lying to me⦠he told me that sales and operations absolutely ARE firewalled from each other, that by no means do the sales types have the necessary administrative or database access to adjust a business' ratings, and that theyâ(TM)re not the sharpest tools in the shed anyway and probably wouldnâ(TM)t understand how to use said access if they had it.
He also told me, though, that their sales department was one of the slimiest bunch of lying scumbags heâ(TM)d ever encountered; and he wouldnâ(TM)t doubt for a moment that they were TELLING businesses that they could have their ratings adjusted if they bought ads.
Imagine all the people...
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) protects online service providers from liability and lawsuits over user-generated content, except in very narrow circumstances where the providers created or developed content themselves.
Should that protection apply if Yelp charges to remove negative reviews? At that point, it the site still user-generated content? Suppose there were 1000 anonymous monkeys adding negative reviews of Slashdot, and positive reviews of Slashdot. Then Yelp charges Slashdot to remove the negative reviews. Can Yelp still claim that the site is nothing but user generated content? That's a slippery slope...
Imagine that Yelp merely took the sentences from people's reviews, and charged to remove the negative sentences. Can they claim protection then? What if they selectively removed letters and rearranged the words to form different reviews? Is that user generated content? It seems to me that they crossed the line by charging to remove reviews, and they should not be protected.
Yelp would still have won today, since the basis was that there was no evidence against them, only suspicion.