A Bad Review Can Hurt Your Business. But Is It Defamation?

Has your business received a bad review? My Century City law firm hears from clients all the time about bad reviews, ranging from F1000 companies to mom-and-pop shops. No matter what platform they’re published on — Google, Yelp, Glassdoor, The Tea — they can impact your business.  

As an attorney and entrepreneur, I support the First Amendment and believe honest reviews matter. Honest criticism deserves protection, and it can improve your business. Fake customer stories and competitor smear campaigns do not. 

So, what can you do? And can you get a bad review taken down? Sometimes, the answer is yes. 

Here is what you need to know before you can have a review taken down or pursue a defamation case. 

1. Is the review a false statement of fact? 

No one wins a defamation case simply because a review is mean or harmful. You must establish that the reviewer published a false and defamatory statement of fact about your company and that the statement caused harm to your business. 

The distinction between fact and opinion is critical: 

• Opinion: “This was the worst restaurant experience of my life.” 
• Fact: “The restaurant charged my credit card three times and refused to refund me.” 
• Opinion: “They are dishonest.” 
• Fact: “They did not refund my deposit.” 

Truth, or substantial truth, is a complete defense. I sometimes describe it as the Monopoly get-out-of-jail-free card. 

2. Was the reviewer even a customer? 

Competitors are increasingly “throwing each other under the bus” with false reviews.  

The absence of a purchase is not automatically decisive in a case because someone may have had a legitimate experience as a prospective customer, vendor, or guest. The analysis changes when the reviewer claims to have been a customer, and there is no record of a relationship or transaction ever having occurred. 

For example, if someone writes, “I hired this company, and they destroyed my property,” and the company proves the person never hired it, then that customer experience could be provably false and evidence of intent. 

3. What is the relationship of the reviewer to the company?

Motive matters when proving your case. Was the reviewer a former employee, competitor, paid attacker, or someone involved in another dispute?  

Businesses are seeing increasingly coordinated campaigns against them. The FTC Consumer Review Rule prohibits businesses from buying or selling fake reviews, including reviews by people without actual experience. 

If you can prove motive, it can help your case.

4. What if the reviewer is anonymous? 

Unfortunately, sometimes you don’t know who left the review. Being anonymous doesn’t prove defamation. Anonymous speech receives First Amendment protection, and courts generally require sufficient evidence of defamation before compelling disclosure.  

If your poor review is anonymous, your business may file against a Doe defendant, a placeholder for someone whose identity is unknown. Then you should try to seek the account information through emails, timestamps, or IP information from the platform to prove an identity. A second subpoena to the Internet service provider may identify the subscriber.