Yes, the First Amendment protects your right, as a consumer, to express your personal opinions about any business you ordered products or services from, no matter how unfavorable those opinions may be. The First Amendment also protects your right to express those opinions anonymously, so if you’d rather not tell the whole world that you had a bad experience with the customer-service representative at Ashley Madison, the law allows you to post an unfavorable review of the company without revealing your real name. Still, despite the abundance and convenience of online review sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google+, and Angie’s List, many consumers are reluctant to share negative experiences on these sites. Why? They worry about being sued for defamation. They read about aggressive businesses who bury non-disparagement clauses in form contracts and who file multi-million-dollar libel and slander claims in far-flung jurisdictions, based solely on a negative Yelp review. So they keep their opinions to themselves, depriving the consuming public of the benefit of their experiences. (This is known, incidentally, as a “chilling effect”).
Unfortunately, if you rip into a shady business with a scathing (and well-deserved) online review, there is always a possibility that the business will sue you for defamation. These claims are often frivolous and filed only as an intimidation tactic, but they are a pain to deal with nonetheless. Still, when a business deserves a one-star review, and has dealt with you in such a way that you feel an obligation to warn other consumers about the business, you can still write that scathing review with little risk of retaliation. Here are five considerations to keep in mind as you write that review: