Yelp is responsible for removing defamatory comments from its site, a California appeals court ruled Tuesday. According to Courthouse News Service, the ruling stems from a 2013 lawsuit between a client and her law firm in a personal injury case. The client, Ava Bird, believed that Hassell Law Group had poorly represented her, and allegedly posted numerous comments on the law firm's Yelp page accusing the firm of "ma[king] a bad situation worse." She left the firm one star, and when the client would not remove the comments at the firm's request, Hassell Law Group sued her.

At this point, Yelp as a company was still not involved, but that changed when in 2014 a judge awarded Hassell Law Group over half a million dollars and ordered Yelp to remove Bird's reviews. Yelp refused, but the judge wasn't hearing it. "Yelp's claimed interest in maintaining [its] website as it deems appropriate does not include the right to second-guess a final court judgment which establishes that statements by a third party are defamatory and thus unprotected by the First Amendment," wrote the judge in the case.

A final decision was made Tuesday of this week, and Yelp will be forced to remove Bird's comments. Yelp, perhaps obviously, is worried of the precedent such an order will set.

"In a single jumbled ruling, the court managed to contravene and contort longstanding precedent concerning the First Amendment, constitutional due process, and Sec. 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act," Yelp spokesperson Vince Sollitto wrote. "It gives those who dislike certain speech — here, a lawyer who was upset at reviews from her clients — the ability to require their removal while denying the website hosting that speech the ability to defend its editorial rights to publish the speech or rebut the claims."

With such a precedent now established, one can expect the review site to receive a flood of demands from business owners around the country that allegedly defamatory reviews be removed. And like with the perceived abuse of DMCA takedown notices, it is easy to imagine Yelp simply complying rather than investigating each and every claim or risking a lawsuit.

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