Well, now we know that fining people won’t work. After the New York Post reported that Chris Wagoner, owner of the Union Street Guest House, a Hudson, N.Y., hotel, wrote a clause into his guest policy asserting the right to charge guests $500 for leaving bad Yelp (YELP) reviews, a special kind of Internet chaos ensued: The story got picked up on other websites, and offended readers—most of whom had never visited the hotel—rushed to vent. On Yelp. Wagoner issued a comment in the middle of the day to say the policy was a joke, but this failed to stem the tide.
Wagoner is hardly the first merchant targeted with this sort of malice. In June an Australian pop star encouraged her Twitter (TWTR) followers to leave bad reviews for her local dry cleaner. A year ago, New York State’s attorney general levied $350,000 in fines against 19 local businesses that had written fake reviews of their businesses.
