Last week, the California Supreme Court ruled that the review website Yelp cannot be forced to take down negative reviews.
The Associated Press reported, in a 4-3 decision, the court claimed that coercing Yelp into taking down reviews “could interfere with and undermine the viability of an online platform.”
The Hassell v. Bird case stems from an original defamation case filed by attorney Dawn Hassell in 2013 against her former client, Ava Bird. Bird reportedly left a negative review of Hassell’s law firm, Hassell Law Group, on Yelp.
According to a summary in tech site Engadget, the San Francisco Superior Court ruled in favor of Hassell because Bird did not appear in court and demanded Bird remove the review. The court also issued a separate order for Yelp to take down the review, which was not a party in the original lawsuit. The Court of Appeals agreed with the lower court’s ruling. Yelp argued that requiring the site to take down content published by a third-party would violate the Communications Decency Act. It then appealed the case.
In a blog post celebrating the decision, Yelp’s Deputy General Counsel, Aaron Schur, wrote, “Yelp fought this case all the way to the Supreme Court of California to protect its First Amendment right as a publisher, due process right to a hearing in connection with any order that targets speech on Yelp’s website, and to preserve the integrity of the CDA.”
“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, and those of us that use such platforms to express ourselves cannot be easily silenced through such tactics either,” Yelp’s statement continued. “Of course, Yelp has no interest in publishing defamation, which is not helpful to consumers, and our Terms of Service prohibit the posting of defamatory content. But defamation is more than just a label, and so Yelp studies court orders to ensure they are valid and actually make a showing that defamation has occurred, before Yelp removes reviewer content. Any reviewer on Yelp can also remove any of their own reviews.”
