[kefka]

http://nypost.com/2014/10/13/restaurant-fights-yelps-alleged...

Restaurant tells everyone to leave bad ratings, because good ratings are hidden since they didn't pay extortion.

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https://www.reddit.com/r/food/comments/zdq0f/yelp_is_blackma...

Yelp "makes 4-5 star reviews go away" when restaurant refuses to pay extortion.

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http://www.cbsnews.com/news/inside-yelps-blackmail-lawsuit-c...

Stoppelman says that businesses want to control their reputation, and Yelp's position is to charge for that. Question here is, if money means hiding bad reviews, is that extortion? Sure seems so.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericgoldman/2014/09/03/court-sa...

The courts said that "Pay to Play" isn't strictly extortion. And claims that Yelp themselves wrote bad reviews were unsubstantiated (no proof, server logs can be a 'tricksy' thing....).

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https://www.cnet.com/news/to-mock-yelp-restaurant-asks-custo...

This has gotten bad enough, that businesses are telling customers to seed YELP with good "Bad reviews".

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Seriously, when they call, and you fail to pay, your page on YELP goes to the toilet. How much "proof" do you need? There seems to be a misdirection by blaming 3rd party customers, but seriously. They're using blackmail as their market strategy.

[keymone]

> Restaurant tells everyone to leave bad ratings

so a PR campaign,

> https://www.reddit.com/r/food/comments/zdq0f...

top comment from the same page: so, I found the Yelp page, and there are 26 reviews filtered out. Of those, the reviewers have a combined 27 friends, and they all come from just 5 people. None of them has more than 15 reviews, and the majority have less than 3. If you have almost no friends and almost no reviews, your reviews are probably going to get filtered out. Also, a lot of her 5-star reviews happened in a 3-day period, which reeks of fake-reviews,

> Question here is, if money means hiding bad reviews, is that extortion?

you have not yet demonstrated "money means hiding bad reviews" but already sure it's extortion,

> Forbes article - Court Says Yelp Doesn't Extort Businesses

oooook?

> cnet article

article about same business from your first link

> when they call, and you fail to pay, your page on YELP goes to the toilet. How much "proof" do you need?

you've made a claim, i believe you forgot to include the "proof"? that specific claim by the way is trivially demonstrable using wayback machine