Eagle eyed users of Yelp may have noticed something different on the site. Yelp issued a statement on their blog and this warning on some of their pages:
The inciting incident that garnered this response from Yelp, was one New York dentist that filed a lawsuit against a patient for leaving a negative review on the site. BuzzFeed reported that Dr. Nima Dayani filed a defamation lawsuit against Mary Rohs and “at least four” others who have left similarly negative reviews, claiming their words have “have harmed his practice over time.”
The above warning pop-up was added to Dr. Nima Dayani’s page notifying consumers that he might sue them too if they negatively review the establishment.
Rohs’s review, which can still be found on Dayani’s Yelp page, reads:
Read Mardi R.‘s review of Nima Dayani, DDS on Yelp
Dayani states that he DID diagnose her, and that claiming otherwise is an accusation of malpractice, “when you are publicly accusing someone of malpractice,” says Dayani, “you are damaging their reputation.” I wonder how he feels about the warning on his page? It clearly won’t do anything for his reputation.
Yelp’s vice president of public policy made the following statement to BuzzFeed, said:
“When you as a consumer share your honest opinion in some type of public way on Yelp or otherwise, it can mean negative reviews. Businesses, rather than responding diplomatically or using feedback to improve operations, go out and hire a lawyer waging that the consumer who wrote this review is more likely to pull the review off than hire a defense attorney and defend themselves. By merely threatening, it doesn’t take going to court to bully the person in order for that business to censor the user.”
The lawsuit is still “ongoing” so information is coming in slowly… but, as if going to the dentist wasn’t painful enough!
Featured image source: [buzzfeed]