Working for a nonprofit, I once was ripped off by a service provider. I posted a Yelp review describing the facts of the case and saying "would-be customers, be careful." This service provider retaliated by posting false and malicious statements about my character. Lucky we had a pro-bono lawyer, or this would have cost me thousands. As it is, it did cost the nonprofit thousands (in the ripoff). We wasted time too.<p>(Hint: it's really hard to collect after you get a favorable judgement in small claims court. Small claims court is a waste of time unless you're making a claim against a deep-pocketed multinational corporation.)<p>This experience taught me that Yelp is useless for anything except five-star reviews. The personal risk of using Yelp to tell the truth about bad service is simply too high.
Since sites like facebook seem to be taking more of an active role in censoring/curating comments and content, it seems like this exemption would no longer apply to them at some point.
B.S.<p>this is orders of magnitude less significant than big studios removing random youtube videos from the air, accusing them of copyright infringement, even ones that have no background music, just because it says bad things about something the studio worked on.
I don't know why most of the comments on here, so far, are so nonchalant about this.<p>> Hassell sued Bird for libel and won a judgment for more than $550,000 in damages and costs, as well as an injunction ordering Bird to remove the ostensibly defamatory material from Yelp<p>This is fucking nuts. How can someone be sued for $550K for writing a bad yelp review.<p>Can someone please explain why the law allows for ridiculous damages like this.<p>If this is allowed, I would wipe my online identity and live in Tor permanently.
One wonders if Ava Bird is actually OK. Do people often drop off the grid like that and fail to respond to court papers &c?<p>UK: I suspect the legal situation is a bit more complex here (it usually is), so perhaps the title should be 'most important law in the US'?
> <i>"Because of the immunity it grants to publishers who act as intermediaries for this flow of information and commentary, “Section 230 is the backbone of the Internet,” says Thomas Burke"</i><p>If Yelp was a pure intermediary, perhaps they would have a case, but they are not and neither are any of the other companies mentioned. All these companies decide what they want to keep on their sites and what they want to remove. All of them can and do delete information and block accounts of people that break their rules.<p>They should not be able to hide behind Section 230 by keeping information on their site that they know to be libellous or illegal and they should be prosecuted for doing so.
Can Yelp have it both ways? It seems Bird was ordered to remove the comment, but Hassel couldn't prove she made them.<p>Yelp would either have to say that Bird made the comments, and absolve themselves of responsibility, or instead become responsible. Otherwise it would seem that any anonymous comment could be used to skip libel penalties. Surely there has to be precedent for this in the past few years.
So, what if sites only have to remove the content if it's been ruled as defamatory? If it's some dumb little thing like an immature comment on a Youtube video, no big deal. If it's something injurious like a bad review on something that matters, then yeah, should be taken down.<p>Am I missing something here?
Couldn't Yelp just leave the comment up but add a message to note that it has ruled as defamation by the court? Maybe the court should structure its order like that, so that no content has to be removed but the plaintiff can get some relief.