Tag Archives: W. Blake Gray

How to manipulate on-line reviews with a clear conscience — get a federal court ruling

manipulate on-line reviews yelpAlways wondered how legitimate the scores and reviews were on sites like Yelp, Angie’s List, and the Wine Spectator? Now, thanks to a federal appeals court ruling, you don’t have to wonder: Legitimacy may not matter. The sites may be able to manipulate the ratings, and they don’t necessarily have to tell you what they’ve done.

Or, as Lou Bright, the blog’s unofficial attorney, says: ?This does have the ethical aroma of dead rat, doesn ?t it? Yet neither Yelp nor the Wine Spectator are legally bound to be morally upright. The First Amendment allows for an awful lot of disreputable speech. ?

The court decision, made earlier this month in San Francisco, didn’t break new legal ground when it found that the possible ?engineering ? of review postings on Yelp, based on whether businesses bought an ad on the site, were legal. The ruling came after several businesses sued Yelp, claiming the site moved unfavorable reviews higher and moved favorable reviews lower on the site ? or removed favorable reviews altogether ? if the businesses didn’t buy ads.

Said the ruling: ?It is not unlawful for Yelp to post and sequence the reviews. As Yelp has the right to charge for legitimate advertising services, the threat of economic harm that Yelp leveraged is, at most, hard bargaining. ?

A legal thing here, so I don’t get sued. Yelp’s senior director of litigation said the company didn’t make review decisions based on whether anyone bought ads, and there is a disclaimer on the Yelp site. And I’m not saying Yelp does that. Or that Angie’s List, the Spectator or anyone else does it. Or that it goes on at all anywhere.

Rather, as W. Blake Gray wrote when he broke the story last week, the ruling reaffirms that sites or magazines that do reviews can charge for upgraded placement, higher scores, or better reviews with a clear conscience. After all, it’s just hard bargaining.

I talked to three other attorneys for this post, and each said the same thing as Bright: It’s not a consumer-friendly practice,and there may be risk in the long run, but it’s not necessarily illegal. As long as the site or magazine doesn’t commit libel (which is often difficult to prove, says Dallas attorney Trey Crawford), and doesn’t run afoul of the Federal Trade Commission, it’s on safe legal ground. Some court decisions have even gone as far as to equate engineering with “editorial discretion.”

What can you do to make sure ratings and reviews aren’t engineered? Look for a disclaimer on the site, like the one I use, and will continue to use. No one pays me for favorable reviews or to review their product, and it will always be that way. Because, if there isn’t a disclaimer, anything is possible.

Winebits 280: “Value” wine, blind tasting, wine scores

? Missing the point:The Wine Curmudgeon does not like being cranky all the time. I would much rather be happy, secure in the knowledge that the wine world ?s foolishness is a thing of the past. And then I run across stuff like this, which explains why a $200 bottle of wine can be a value. So can a Ferrari, I suppose, if it ?s the previous year ?s model with low mileage. The point, of course, is that blog posts and stories like these scare the hell out of most wine drinkers, and particularly those wine drinkers who are just getting started or haven ?t really started yet. They see advice to buy $200 wine and run, in panic-stricken terror, for the soft drink aisle of the supermarket.

? The power of blind tasting: Mike Veseth at the Wine Economist talks about several recent tastings, where ?where the wines easily fooled us (or perhaps we just fooled ourselves). .. ? The point being that the tastings were done blind, and the results did not jive with what was expected. Wrote Veseth: ?Our perception of wine is sometimes less about truth and more about  context and expectations than we might want to think. That ?s not the conclusion I thought I would find when I set up this tiny experiment. ? He also writes interestingly about the power of cheap wine (in this case, Two-buck Chuck) to skew the results. This is why blind tasting is the most powerful tool the reviewer ? or any wine drinker, for that matter ? can use.

? Coffee-flavor those wine scores: W. Blake Gray, who isn ?t thrilled with wine scores but long ago made his peace with them, can offer a much more refreshing take on the subject than those of us who think scores are the spawn of the devil. He analyzed the scores that 29 California cabernet sauvignons and red blends received in a recent Wine Spectator, and found that that the wines that mentioned mocha in the tasting notes got at least 92 points; those that didn ?t didn ?t break 89. Yes, it ?s a small sample size, and so on and so forth, but telling nonetheless.