The Ethics of Online Reviews

I noted with great interest a story off the Wall Street Journal website about a lawsuit that’s being filed against Yelp.com for extortion. If you’re not familiar with the company, it’s basically a big online comments page, just like the ones on Amazon and other e-retailers, only not attached to any particular company or vendor. If you like a particular restaurant, dry cleaners or bookstore, you can go on the site and leave a review – and if somebody did you wrong in a customer service situation, you can go on the site and blast them for it. It seems like a great idea, doesn’t it? You can get real, raw feedback from the customers who have already made use of the product or service you’re thinking of putting money into, and get revenge on all of those rude and incompetent idiots who not only got your blood up but ruined your favorite shirt, too. Until we remember the basic problem with comments on the Internet…

If you read online comments (not that I am for one moment suggesting that anyone ought to do that) you will have probably already encountered those fun-loving beings known as “trolls” who insist on leaving posts that either insist that some completely impossible events have happened to the author, insult all of the other authors, or attempt to convince you to visit another site where you can find highly specialized pornography and/or make huge amounts of money for doing absolutely nothing. For the most part these electronic scribbling are harmless; the Internet equivalent of graffiti, but they do point up the credibility of anonymous comments left on websites: effectively nothing. It limits the utility of most online review functions (the ones on Craigslist are a good example) to the extent that you need to take them with a considerable grain of salt. But that’s not really the problem with Yelp, and it’s not what occasioned the lawsuit…

According to the news story (and several similar accounts), unless you give the company money, either for advertising or “membership” services of some other kind, you will never see any positive reviews of your business – and will find negative allegations that are completely false. The people who own Yelp are claiming the whole thing is hogwash, of course, but now they’re having the identical problem: people are coming out of the woodwork to claim that they’ve been scammed by the company, and there is no way to verify if any of THOSE claims are for real, either…

On the one hand, not only do people in this country have a Constitutional right to free expression, but there’s no effective way to regulate content on the Internet anyway. On the other hand, even in the United States you do not have the right to libel or slander other people (or their companies), and if you are a business entity you can (and probably will) be sued if you try to extort money out of people, disparage them for no reason, or just provide them with a good target and an easy way to squeeze money out of you in exchange for dropping a lawsuit. It’s an impossible business to be in, and I personally don’t believe it has a future; eventually only comments like the ones on Amazon (which you have to have a login and account information on file to post) are likely to survive. But in the interim, all of us who set foot onto the Web have a question in ethics to consider…

Do you have any responsibility to post positive comments about a business you have positive feelings for? Do you have any responsibility to post negative comments about a business with which you’ve had negative outcomes (to protect other consumers)? And if you know that a company which provides a forum for such comments may not be trustworthy, do you have any responsibility to avoid posting there? Or even warning other consumers away from their site, if you believe they are acting unfairly? For that matter, if you ARE such a company, how can you be expected to weed out trolls (who are attempting to destroy a business purely for the fun of it by using your service) from legitimate informants? Can you, ethically, post such comments if you can’t say for sure that they are legitimate? If you do so anyway, are you ethically responsible for the results of those comments?

It’s worth thinking about…