Bad Reviews: How Do Businesses Legally Take Them Down?

In the age of the “trust economy,” no publicly offered good or service is immune from the looming threat of the online review. They have become the first point of inquiry for approximately 40 percent of all U.S. adults, according to a 2016 study from the Pew Research Center. A mere 16 percent of Americans claim to “never” check online reviews before buying new items. This number drops down to only 4 percent for the demographic aged 18-29. The growing importance of online reviews to consumers has forced businesses into the online ecosystem of ratings and reviews, regardless of whether or not they want to be a part of it.

While the direct impact of online reviews on the success of a business can be difficult to study, one can assume negative reviews do little to improve their bottom line. One Harvard Business School study suggests that a one star increase on a restaurant’s Yelp review page could result in a 5 to 9 percent boost in revenues for the business. Alternatively, the loss of a single star could be equally impactful. This is especially alarming to businesses considering that reviews can often be inaccurate, or flat out faked by other companies seeking to undermine the competition.

So how can a business legally go about removing reviews they deem to be harmful to their success? In the majority of cases, there is very little that can be done, since there is nothing illegal about expressing your honest opinion about a given business. However, if a business is determined to take action, they are typically advised to first contact the reviewer directly, requesting to remove the post. In the case of a legitimate review, a polite request to take it down can resolve the situation right off the bat. If the reviewer is unwilling to remove the post, a second course of action would generally only apply if the reviewer has either (1) violated the Terms of Service of the hosting site, (2) posted demonstrably false defamatory content, or (3) engaged in copyright infringement within the review.

Terms of Service: Many review sites will have terms and conditions which prohibit obvious displays of bigotry, harassment, threats, as well as information which is clearly irrelevant for the purposes of reviewing a particular good or service. Yelp’s “Content Guidelines” discourage the use of “inappropriate content” (bigotry, harassment, etc.), “conflicts of interest,” “promotional content,” irrelevant posts, the publication of individuals’ private information, the unauthorized use of intellectual property, as well as posting reviews with the intention of demanding payment from a business. Each review site has a different set of guidelines, with varying levels of willingness to enforce them. It is up to the discretion of the website to determine the extent to which they actively police content for violations, as they have no legal obligation to do so, for now at least. Some review sites like Ripoff Report, have made it explicitly clear that they do not remove content posted by their users under any circumstance.

Defamation: If the website is unwilling to remove a review which contains defamatory content, the next step would entail obtaining a court order against the reviewer which establishes defamation. In order to qualify as defamation, the review must contain a “false statement of fact,” that is understood as “being of and concerning the plaintiff” and “tending to harm the reputation of plaintiff.” The court must decide whether the reviewer has asserted a statement of verifiable fact, which has later been proven false. The court order declaring defamation can be issued, and submitted to search engines in order to de-index the review from their search results. Google has been known to remove thousands of URLs every year from its search results on the basis of defamation by court order. The review sites themselves however, remain under no obligation to remove defamatory content, even when presented with a valid court order. A California Supreme Court decision regarding this issue is currently pending.

Additonally, due to the protections in place by Section 230 of the Communications De