Virginia Court Commands Yelp to Hand Over Anonymous Reviewers

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By Kurt Wagner2014-01-10 21:53:41 UTC

A Virginia Circuit Court has ordered Yelp to hand over the identities of seven anonymous commenters, according to court documents dated Tuesday.

The ruling was the result of an appeal by Yelp following a subpoena issued by Hadeed Carpet Cleaning, a small business near Arlington, Va. The subpoena legally requested Yelp identify seven anonymous commenters who left negative reviews for the company.

See also: 11 Things You Didn't Know About Yelp

Yelp objected to the subpoena, and the court ruled in favor of Hadeed. The freedom to speak anonymously is protected by the First Amendment, but the court ruled that "defamatory speech is not entitled to constitutional protection."

Hadeed claimed that it could not match the negative reviews to customers from their database, and that the defamatory reviews were therefore posted by people who were not actual customers.

In an interview given to The Atlantic , Paul Levy, a lawyer at a non-profit advocacy group called Public Citizen, which argued the case for Yelp, explained why the company feels this claim is invalid.

"They don't say that the substance is false," he said. "They say, well, we can't be sure this person is a customer. No one with this pseudonym from this city is in our customer database. Well, of course! It's a pseudonym. They haven't shown anything that really would lead any person to believe that this isn't a customer."

Despite the court ruling, the identities of the reviewers may still be protected; Yelp is appealing once again, this time to the State Supreme Court.

For others around the country, Tuesday's ruling should not have a massive impact on users who comment anonymously. Sources familiar with the case told Mashable that this incident is somewhat isolated to Virginia, and that other states require more concrete evidence of wrongdoing when it comes to subpoenas.

The entire incident is relatively rare. Yelp receives between one and five requests for commenter identities per month from businesses out of more than 50 million total reviews.

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Image: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Topics: anonymous reviewers, Business, Small Business, state supreme court, U.S., yelp