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What to Make of Yelp's Inexplicable Censorship?
Has Yelp lost all credibility as a useful resource for consumers to research the quality of goods, services and the companies which provide them? The question is suddenly relevant in light of a scandal involving the censorship of a review of a small business from Louisiana, a review which just happened to be the company's first-ever on the increasingly obscure consumer review site, and one which the company has aggressively asserted was written independently of the business, its leadership and its employees.
The review was quite flattering from the perspective of the medical equipment company being reviewed, however Yelp has offered no evidence to support the claim that the review was the result of an incentive, and the company being accused of providing the incentive for the now-censored review has hinted at possible legal action against the once-popular complaint website that now appears to be more of an afterthought to both businesses and consumers alike. The rationale, they deduce, is that by censoring the review and going out of its way to communicate to potential customers viewing the page that the company's only review on the site has been censored due to suspicion that it was unauthentic, Yelp has unfairly besmirched the public's view of a firm with an otherwise impeccable reputation and a history of completing transactions without a single documented complaint lodged against it.
For a company that has been in existence for 19 months and shows no signs of slowing down, does the absence of publicly available complaints and/or negative experiences depicted by customers justify the company's position that Yelp took an unprecedented measure by subtly accusing it of bribing a consumer without providing any evidence to support the claim?
Does Yelp owe it to the companies around which the entirety of the site's content exists to produce or even simply to possess supportive evidence before accusing a business of attempting to game its system? Does the company whose reputation has been damaged have a legitimate case against Yelp for the reckless assertion that it somehow bribed or coerced the favorable review out of the only customer it has that uses the incrasingly obscure Yelp?
Please share your thoughts in the comments.
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