After at least four years, a US court has finally come up with a decision on the alleged Yelp review manipulation case. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that the online company is not doing anything illegal when it comes to their reviews of businesses that avail their services. The term is 'hard bargaining.'
"As Yelp has the right to charge for legitimate advertising services, the (alleged) threat of economic harm ... is, at most, hard bargaining and not extortion or unfair business practices,” Judge Marsha Berzon said.
Yelp won the case on a 3-0 ruling. The federal judge dismissed a proposed class-action damage suit filed by small-business owners who claim that one some Yelp representatives told them that the ratings of their businesses will depend on the amount of ads they will buy. They claim that they are being extorted to shell out some cash when in fact, their brand is capable enough of making it to top by a transparent review.
"I've got hundreds of people who have called me with this problem: When they stopped advertising with Yelp, their good reviews got stripped out," a business owners' lawyer, Lawrence Murray, said after Tuesday's ruling.
"What does it take, to have a gun to their head? ... This is extortion in any other setting."
The company insisted that this Yelp review manipulation accusations are not true. They said that they use a top of the line review-filtering software to distinguish which are advertisers and non-advertisers.
“For years, fringe commentators have accused Yelp of altering business ratings for money," said the San Francisco company's litigation director, Aaron Schur. "Yelp has never done this, and individuals making such claims are either misinformed or, more typically, have an ax to grind."
A company spokesman said that they are pleased with the court ruling.
“We are pleased the appeals court upheld our earlier victory in this case,” Vince Sollitto, a Yelp spokesman, told Quartz. “Millions of consumers rely on Yelp every day because they trust our content, which is why businesses can’t pay to remove or alter their reviews.”
