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Yelp Filtering Out Legitimate Yelp Reviews, Making Good Reviews Disappear and Artificially Affecting Business’ Ratings

We’ll bet that you thought that the posting of Yelp reviews on Yelp was an open system, allowing legitimate users to post a Yelp review – whether good or bad – without being censored. Well, if you thought that, you were wrong, as we ourselves learned, all too frustratingly, this week. It turns out that while Yelp claims to only filter out reviews “to protect consumers and business owners from fake, shill or malicious reviews”, in fact they filter Yelp reviews with no apparent rhyme or reason, based on a criteria which they coyly demur to explain, saying “It’s a bit of a Catch-22, but the more we describe how the system works, the easier it is for people to game the system and write fake reviews.” Moreover, this is exactly the sort of shenanigans that got them in hot water just a year ago, resulting in a class action Yelp lawsuit last year. The Yelp lawsuits last year claimed that Yelp would only remove a bad (and demonstrably fake, shill or malicious) review if the place that received the bad review paid for advertising on Yelp. In otherwords, Yelp was accused of extortion.