What to do about a fake or defamatory review in the United States
By ReputationKiln Editorial · Published
In the United States, start with the platform routes, document, flag with evidence, respond in public, then understand the one structural fact that shapes everything legal: a federal law shields platforms from liability for what users post, so you generally cannot sue the review site, you sue the reviewer who wrote it. State defamation law then requires a false statement of fact, published, made with at least negligence, or, if you are a public figure in the context, with actual malice, that caused harm. Truth and opinion are protected, and many states have anti-SLAPP laws that protect honest reviewers from being silenced by lawsuits, which is a reason to be sure your case is genuinely about a false statement of fact before you start.
The routes, in order
A cease-and-desist letter to the reviewer is the usual first step. If it is provably false, defamatory and seriously harmful, a state-court claim can follow, including using legal process to unmask an anonymous reviewer, and a judgment is then what a platform will usually act on to remove the content. Where a competitor or a broker is behind a fake-review campaign, your lawyer can weigh a complaint to the FTC or a state attorney general under the fake-reviews rule and state unfair-competition law, plus, in some cases, unfair-competition claims of your own.
Extortion, and the limit
A "pay or we keep posting" demand is extortion under state law, and a commercially-motivated scheme can reach federal wire fraud. Do not pay, document, use the platform's extortion-report route, and involve law enforcement. The limit is real: defamation litigation is expensive and slow, the platform-immunity catch means the reviewer is your target, and none of this removes a fake quickly. Suppression of an honest review can itself break the FTC rule, so keep strictly to genuinely false or abusive content, and read the panic-tax page before paying anyone.
Sources
- Section 230 generally shields platforms from liability for user-posted reviews, so recourse for a defamatory review runs against its author. — Communications Decency Act, Section 230. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 · checked 2026-06-04