Plaintiff restaurant owner sued Yelp under California unfair competition law, claiming that certain statements Yelp made about the filters it uses to ascertain the unreliability or bias of user reviews were misleading and untrue. For example, plaintiff alleged that Yelp advertised that its filtering process “takes the reviews that are the most trustworthy and from the most established sources and displays them on the business page.” But, according to plaintiff, the filter did not give consumers the most trusted reviews, excluded legitimate reviews, and included reviews that were demonstrably false and biased.
Yelp filed an Anti-SLAPP motion to strike plaintiff’s complaint under California Code of Civil Procedure section 425.16, arguing that the complaint sought to interfere with Yelp’s free speech rights, and targeted speech that appeared in a public forum and was a matter of public interest. The trial court granted the motion, and plaintiff sought review with the Court of Appeal of California. On appeal, the court reversed.
It held that a motion to strike under the mechanism of California’s Anti-SLAPP statute was unavailable under section 425.17 (c), which prohibits Anti-SLAPP motions against “any cause of action brought against a person primarily engaged in the business of selling or leasing goods or services,” where certain other conditions are met, including the statement being made for purposes of promoting the speaker’s goods or services.
The appellate court disagreed with the lower court which found that Yelp’s statements about its filters were mere “puffery”. Instead, the court held that these actions disqualified the Anti-SLAPP motion under the very language of the statute pertaining to commercial speech.
Demetriades v. Yelp, Inc., 2014 WL 3661491 (Cal. Ct. App. July 24, 2014)
Evan Brown is an attorney in Chicago advising clients on matters dealing with technology, the internet and new media.