California Supreme Court: Yelp can't be ordered to take down negative posts

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

The California Supreme Court ruled Monday that Yelp.com can’t be forced to remove negative posts on the reviews site, overturning a lower court ruling.

NBC News reported that judges on the California Supreme Court ruled 4-3 in favor of Yelp. The majority opinion argued that forcing online publishers to remove material “could interfere with and undermine the viability of an online platform.”

An attorney for Yelp praised the decision, calling it a victory for “those of us who value sharing one another’s opinions and experiences."


“With this decision, online publishers in California can be assured that they cannot be lawfully forced to remove third-party speech through enterprising abuses of the legal system,” Yelp deputy counsel Aaron Schur wrote in a blog post on the company’s site.

Dawn Hassell, a San Francisco attorney, had filed a lawsuit in 2013 arguing that a former client defamed her on Yelp by posting a false claim about their attorney-client relationship.

A lower court judge ruled the comment was defamatory, and ordered Yelp to remove it. After a second court upheld that ruling, the California Supreme Court sided with Yelp on Monday.

http://thehill.com/policy/technology/395282-california-supreme-court-yelp-cant-be-ordered-to-take-down-negative-posts

[democratisphere]

1. I am no fan of online reviews. Anybody can say anything they want even if it is not true.

I guess the ruling reflects the world with drumpf in charge. Lies have become commonplace and accepted as fact.

[Jake Stern]

2. I don't pay attention to reviews on Yelp and Facebook

They're tied to what's hip at this moment and their use as a tool of revenge really turns me off.

My favorite Chinese joint has low ratings on Yelp but some places that Yelpers have raved about I've found to be mediocre to terrible (overpriced, microscopic portions, snooty hipster staff, etc.).

[Retrograde]

3. As with Amazon, ignore the 1 and 5 star reviews

and read the text of the others. We once found a nice place in Manhattan that had a large number of "bad" reviews that essentially said "don't go here, it's too quiet, just a bunch of old people sitting around drinking beers I never heard of and talking." It was a great place for us!

I review places on Trip Advisor fairly often; most of my reviews are in the 3-4 category, but if a place deserves a 1 I'll give it that and explain why.

[Jake Stern]

6. One of the biggest gripes on Yelp about my favorite restaurant is that it's "too slow"

It's run by an elderly couple, literally a "mom 'n' pop" place where the wife takes the orders and the husband cooks and serves. If its really busy I believe the son pitches in. The food is amazing and the price is very reasonable.

Went to a place that a friend kept gushing about that had nearly all 5 star ratings. The price was eye popping and when it came to any kind of sauce it's like they put the dish next to the sauce pan and fanned the vapor onto the food.

[AlexSFCA]

4. yelp and imdb have long been hijacked

[Liberty Belle]

5. outrageous. A judge actually ruled she'd been defamed.

With that as proof, the defamation should come down.

It needs to be easier to get defamatory stuff down.

I'm a journalist. A serial harasser who's legal entanglements we've covered has harassed us with easily provable defamation on line. For instances, saying we hardly have any readers and inflated our numbers to get sponsors. Even when provided proof - screenshots of our analytics to prove we have millions of hits and hundreds of thousands of visits a month, far more than our sponsorship materials claim, social media sites said they won't take anything down without a court finding of defamation.

They did take down posts threatening our reporter with violence, but apparently using lies as weapons is now legal no matter what, at least on Yelp.

Despicable.

Could Congress pass laws to set this right?

[Jim Lane]

7. The plaintiff made a key mistake by not suing Yelp.

As you say, a judge held that the review was indeed defamatory. Nevertheless, the defamer and Yelp both refused the plaintiff’s demand to remove it. The issue before the California Supreme Court was a lower court’s order directing Yelp to remove the review.

A key point was that the plaintiff had sued the defamer but not Yelp. A crucial vote in the 4-3 decision came from a Justice who was swayed by that fact:

Associate Justice Leondra Kruger said in a separate opinion that she agreed that the removal order against Yelp was invalid, but for a different reason. Hassell did not name Yelp as a defendant, so the company did not get its “own day in court,” Kruger said. [Source: “Yelp can’t be ordered to remove posts, California Supreme Court rules"]

I agree with her. I'm not a journalist, I'm a lawyer, and I'd say that the lower court didn’t have jurisdiction to order a nonparty to do something. If a plaintiff wants relief against Yelp, then Yelp has to be named as a defendant and served with a summons.

[kcr]

8. That's entirely different then

So the takeaway from this isn't that you can't sue to take down bad reviews from websites. It's just that in this particular case someone went about it the wrong way. But of course, that's not the headlines we get in click-bait land.

[Jim Lane]

9. Well, not ENTIRELY different.

First off, as you say, click-bait land is unreliable. When it comes to reporting court decisions that involve any level of complexity, the unreliability increases by an order of magnitude.

That observation is relevant because all I know about this case is one brief story in the Los Angeles Times.

Based on that wholly inadequate information, it appears to me that, of the seven Justices, three of them said that ordering a Yelp takedown would violate the First Amendment, three of them said it wouldn't, and one didn't reach the question because of the procedural point. Also, this was only one state's court. I'd say the takeaway is that more litigation can be expected.