Anonymous Yelp reviewers must be outed, US court rules

1-14-2014 National, Virginia:

A US court in the state of Virginia ruled on 7 January that anonymous users aren't covered by First Amendment protection of free speech if a review "is based on a false statement".

Joe Hadeed, the owner of Hadeed Carpet Cleaning, which is based in Virginia, told the court that seven Yelp users had left anonymous, negative feedback about his business on the review service.

His lawyers filed against Yelp, demanding that it reveal the names of the posters.

The court agreed and ordered Yelp to comply, deeming that Hadeed had provided enough for it to conclude that the Yelp users might not actually have been customers of his business.

Hadeed had told the court that the bad reviews hadn't matched up with actual customers in his database.

Therein lies the "false statement" logic.

Judge William G. Petty of the Circuit Court for the City of Alexandria said in his majority decision that being anonymous online isn't the issue, per se; rather, it's the possibility that somebody's posing as a customer and making false, potentially libelous statements:

The anonymous speaker has the right to express himself on the Internet without the fear that his veil of anonymity will be pierced for no other reason than because another person disagrees with him.

[But] if 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

.A dissenting judge, Senior Judge James W. Haley Jr., said in a separate opinion that Hadeed's assertions about the anonymous bad reviewers not being customers hadn't been proved and thus amounted to little more than self-serving suspicions. ..Continued.. by NakedSecurity