ABSTRACT
Platforms like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Facebook empower consumers to communicate and review products and services and the businesses offering them. These communications can reveal an organization's strengths and weaknesses, but they can also be weaponized to destroy a business's reputation. Social media crises are significant because they include three parties: the organization, the consumer (or user), and the platform. Practitioners and communication teams must be aware of the potential threats to organizational reputations and how the threats can lead to crises and litigation. Platforms respond through content moderation and by algorithmically sorting reviews that appear fraudulent or contrived, and organizations occasionally file defamation claims related to offending reviews. This litigation can be effective regardless of its outcome, but it should not be taken lightly, in a crisis or not, because many such claims have failed on First Amendment and other grounds. This chapter explores crisis situations on social media through ethical and legal perspectives; how consumers use platforms to review products and services in good and bad faith; how platforms moderate the reviews; how businesses respond through litigation; and the practical and legal effectiveness of that litigation, in view of the corresponding First Amendment and procedural challenges.
