Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast, your source for policy rants and raves from Tech Freedom,

Washington, D.C. advocate for the freedom to tinker and innovate.

I'm Evan Schwarzen Svesterber, your host.

On today's show, getting slapped for online speech, could your Yelp reviews land you in court?

Are lawsuits threatening online free speech?

Joining me in our DC studio to discuss this is Mariah Mensa.

She's a recent graduate of Howard University School of Law,

and she is also a policy intern at the R Street Institute.

Mariah, thank you for joining me.

Hello, I'm happy to be here.

So slaps, these are strategic lawsuits against public participation.

Can you explain what a slap is for our listeners?

Well, a slap is exactly what the acronym would suggest.

So it's when someone gets sued primarily because they've gone out of their way to say something that

somebody doesn't like. And usually that involves a balance of power problem, as in the person

doing the slapping has the ability to fund a lawsuit, whereas the person getting slapped,

generally speaking, can't afford it. And this has the

effect of silencing their speech. So essentially, you know, a customer of a business has a bad

experience. They write a review on Yelp. This is very common. Yelp and TripAdvisor and sites like

that, their entire business model is really built on people being able to say what they want.

So the issue is that when you say something the business doesn't like, even if it's a frivolous lawsuit, just the fact that they have

deeper pockets than you can kind of like bankrupt you? Yeah, basically. So you get slapped with a lawsuit

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