Sticks and stones may break my bones
Six months ago I wrote about TripAdvisor's run in with the ASA who said that TripAdvisor could not verify that its user-generated reviews were accurate and honest, and that asking the person submitting the review to tick a box declaring it was genuine was insufficient. In a similar tale from across the Atlantic, a US judge seems to have come to quite the opposite conclusion.
The case involved the owner of the Grand Resort Hotel, Tennessee, who sought to sue TripAdvisor for defamatory comments after it named his establishment in number one position on a list of the top ten dirtiest hotels in America. In its press release, TripAdvisor says "Now in its sixth year, and true to its promise to share the whole truth about hotels to help travelers plan their trips, TripAdvisor names and shames the nation's most hair-raising hotels."
Judge Thomas Seaton ruled that the list was based solely on reviews submitted to the TripAdvisor website, and whilst it may be imperfect, it wasn't defamatory, and explained: "A reasonable person would not confuse a ranking system, which uses consumer reviews as its litmus, for an objective assertion of fact. The reasonable person, in other words, knows the difference between a statement that is inherently subjective and one that is objectively verifiable. It does not appear to the court that a reasonable person could believe that TripAdvisor’s article reflected anything more than the opinions of TripAdvisor’s millions of online users."
He added that nothing in the evidence would lead the court to find that TripAdvisor made a statement of fact, or a statement of opinion that it intended readers to believe was based on facts. He described TripAdvisor's dirtiest hotel list as "clearly unverifiable rhetorical hyperbole".
So when you read "the whole truth", do you immediately think "unverifiable rhetorical hyperbole"? When you read a TripAdvisor article and it says "87% of people who stayed there reported that..." do you remember that they don't really mean 87% of the people who stayed there, but rather they mean 87% of people who filled in a report on its website, which is not in any way a statistically representative sample. In fact, TripAdvisor should add, we don't really know whether these people stayed there or not, whether their claims are genuine or not, or how many of these complaints are really one person posting under multiple internet identities. But according to the judge, a reasonable person couldn't possibly be confused by that.
Compare that with the UK case where the Advertising Standards Authority stated that "it did not believe consumers would necessarily be able to separate genuine reviews from falsified content. Furthermore, asking reviewers to tick a declaration stating that their review was "genuine" was not enough of an incentive to ensure that the truth was told."
www.skillzone.net/newsletter/50-1-When-ticking-a-box-is-not-enough
24th September 2012
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.