The Internet Still Works: Yelp Protects Consumer Reviews

Section 230 helps make it possible for online communities to host user speech: from restaurant reviews, to fan fiction, to collaborative encyclopedias. But recent debates about the law often overlook how it works in practice. To mark its 30th anniversary, EFF is interviewing leaders of online platforms about how they handle complaints, moderate content, and protect their users’ ability to speak and share information.

Yelp hosts millions of reviews written by internet users about local businesses. Most reviews are positive, but over the years, some businesses have tried to pressure Yelp to remove negative reviews, including through legal threats. Since its founding more than two decades ago, Yelp has fought major legal battles to defend reviewers’ rights and preserve the legal protections that allow consumers to share honest feedback online.

Aaron Schur is General Counsel at Yelp. He joined the company in 2010 as one of its first lawyers and has led its litigation strategy for more than a decade, helping secure court decisions that strengthened legal protections for consumer speech. He was interviewed by Joe Mullin, a policy analyst on EFF's Activism Team. 

Joe Mullin: How would you describe Section 230 to a regular Yelp user who doesn’t know about the law?   

Aaron Schur: I'd say it is a simple rule that, generally speaking, when content is posted online, any liability for that content is with the person that created it, not the platform that is displaying it. That allows Yelp to show your review and keep it up if a business complains about it. It also means that we can develop ways to highlight the reviews we think are most helpful and reliable, and mitigate fake reviews in a way, without creating liability for Yelp, because we're allowed to host third party content.

The political debate around Section 230 often centers around the behavior of companies, especially large companies. But we rarely hear about users, even though the law also applies to users. What is the user story that is getting lost? 

Section 230 at heart protects users. It enables a diversity of platforms and content moderation practices—whether it's reviews on Yelp, videos on another platform, whatever it may be. 

Without Section 230, platforms would face heavy pressure to remove consumer speech when we’re threatened with legal action—and that harms users, directly. Their content gets removed. It also harms the greater number of users who would access that content. 

The focus on the biggest tech companies, I think, is understandable but misplaced when it comes to Section 230. We have tools that exist to go after dominant companies, both at the state and the federal level, and Congress could certainly consider competition-based laws—and has, over the last several years. 

Tell me about the editorial decisions that Yelp makes regarding the highlighting of reviews, and the weeding out of reviews that might be fake.  

Yelp is a platform where people share their experiences with local businesses, government agencies, and other entities. People come to Yelp, by the millions, to learn about these places.

With traffic like that come incentives for bad actors to game the system. Some unscrupulous businesses try to create fake reviews, or compensate people to write reviews, or ask family and friends to write reviews. Those reviews will be biased in a way that won’t be transparent. 

Yelp developed an automated system to highlight reviews we find most trustworthy and helpful. Other reviews may be placed in a “not recommended” section where they don’t affect a business’s overall rating, but they’re still visible. That helps us maintain a level playing field and keep user trust. 

Tell me about what your process around complaints around user reviews look like. 

We have a reporting function for reviews. Those reports get looked at by an actual human, who evaluates the review and looks at data about it to decide whether it violates our guidelines. 

We don't remove a review just because someone says it's “wrong,” because we can't litigate the facts in your review. If someone says “my pizza arrived cold,” and the restaurant says, no, the pizza was warm—Yelp is not in a position to adjudicate that dispute. 

That's where Section 230 comes in. It says Yelp doesn’t have to [decide who’s right].  What other types of moderation tools have you built? 

Any business, free of charge, can respond to a review, and that response appears directly below it. They can also message users privately. We know when businesses do this, it’s viewed positively by users.&