Why It's Important: The California Supreme Court ruled Monday that Yelp could not be forced to remove negative reviews on the Hassell Law Group law firm, published by the user Ava Bird. This decision could set a positive precedent for future business, helping Yelp stay a relatively neutral site with the integrity of its contact review system.
Online censorship has always been a source of concern for Internet users, whether in the form of deletions of copyright on videos widely regarded as "fair use", or of repression of overflows of copyright. social media.
However, a part of the internet that has always seemed relatively safe is the review of sites like Yelp. While companies have certainly lobbied for Yelp to remove negative reviews in the past, the company has quite easily diverted most of these concerns.
Unfortunately for Yelp, in 2012, Hassell Law Group (HLG) decided to put more pressure on the platform than other companies. During this year, one of HLG's former clients wrote a bleak review of the law firm, prompting them to sue Ava Bird for defamation.
After the lawsuit ended in favor of HLG (a default win - Bird did not appear in court), Yelp was ordered to withdraw the criticism.
Naturally, Yelp has bristled with this; they were not even asked to represent themselves in the case. As such, the review aggregator argued that they were protected against the order under the Communications Decency Act.
Although the lower courts disagreed with Yelp's argument, the California Supreme Court disagreed with this consensus by a vote of 4-3. The court held that the dismissal of Yelp's argument by the California Court of Appeals was flawed, adding that Yelp was not the publisher or speaker of the content in question ( negative critics of Bird).
Although Bird has always been forced to withdraw the revisions itself, this decision of the Supreme Court could set a favorable precedent for similar cases in the future. After all, the court appears to have determined that Yelp is not responsible for the content of the notices posted by its users and may not be obliged to withdraw it.
In theory, this case could serve to protect the integrity of the Yelp platform, but only time will tell if another company will try something similar to what HLG has done here.