I love stories like this: Link
To sum it up, a Yelp user wrote a negative review for a Mexican restaurant in Saint Louis and the restaurant owner threatened her with a lawsuit if she didn’t remove it. For those that don’t know, Yelp is a social networking site for people that like to eat out. You can sign up to write reviews of your favorite restaurants and browse other opinions via a city breakdown.
Getting back to the story, she received a threat of a $100,000 lawsuit if she didn’t remove the review from the site. Being the social networking butterfly, she responded by using Twitter to pose a question to the collective internet about what she should do. It spread to Digg and the restaurant’s Yelp page is now being bombarded with bad reviews.
So instead of watching the negative review slip away among the positive ones (assuming the food & service was consistently decent), the restaurant owner effectively destroyed his restaurant’s rating in the online world. Not only is the Yelp rating getting trashed, but internet users are spreading the word to any publication that mentions the place; St. Louis blogs, newspapers, forums , etc… I wouldn’t be surprised to see local news coverage eventually.
