Yelp Must ID Reviewers

Yelp, Inc. must turn over the identity of anonymous posters who gave bad reviews asserting, apparently falsely, that they were former customers a carpet cleaning service.

The Virginia Court of Appeals affirmed a trial court’s decision requiring the online reviewing service to comply with a subpoena to identify seven posters who gave negative reviews of Hadeed Carpet Cleaning, Inc.  The carpet cleaning service told the court that the reviewers were not former customers, even though the posts claimed they were.  The appellate court found that “if the Doe defendants were not customers of Hadeed, then their Yelp reviews are defamatory.”

“Generally, a Yelp review is entitled to First Amendment protection because it is a person’s opinion about a business that they patronized,” the appellate court wrote.  “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 Virginia court found leading cases on disclosing anonymous posters, Dendrite and Cahill, of little value because Virginia has a specific statute for discovering the identity of persons communicating anonymously over the internet.  Both the trial court and the appellate court found that Hadeed met the criteria in the Virginia statute.

Yelp, Inc. v. Hadeed Carpet Cleaning, Inc., Court of Appeals Virginia, No. 0116-13-4, decided January 7, 2014.