Salakjit Hagerty's story is typical. Archetypal, even. Thousands of hardworking independent business owners have told, and still tell, the same heartbreaking tale. Only the details vary. This is the point.

Two and half years ago, she held a grand opening for her Thai restaurant in San Francisco's Hayes Valley. The next day she went online and saw what any new business owner craves: a long scroll of five-star Yelp reviews. Soon after, though, she began noticing those positive reviews were disappearing from her business's page. Some regular customers even told her that they'd written raves that also disappeared.

During this time, she began receiving calls and emails from Yelp salespeople soliciting ads that run between about $300 and $1,000. Believing the two things were connected — declining to buy ads and the positive reviews disappearing — Hagerty and her husband hung a sign in the restaurant's window:

Stop the bully. Boycott Yelp. Our customers tell us they've submitted very good reviews of our food and service. Yet, they never show on our reviews. We asked Yelp, we were told, "Perhaps if you paid to do Yelp ads, we could help you with this."

columnist Sandy Banks happened to walk past Bai Thong Thai and saw the sign. Intrigued, she found they weren't alone in believing Yelp was extorting them. As Banks wrote in her April 20 column : "Hundreds of disgruntled business owners have accused Yelp of tweaking its review system in order to prod low-rated companies to advertise on its site." Banks' column was picked up by the, Eater, SFist, others. A picture of the sign went viral.

Indeed, the internet is teeming with these claims. You see it at yelp-sucks.com or the Facebook page We Hate Yelp, or, ironically, Yelp's page for itself, which boasts a three-star overall rating, dragged down by livid small business owners seeking comeuppance. The company's been subjected to several class-action lawsuits, at least one of which included an extortion allegation. A Freedom of Information request last year released nearly 700 Federal Trade Commission reports filed against the company, a good portion of which use the words "extort" or "extortion."

It's a sensational notion; unsurprisingly Banks wasn't the first to raise it — East Bay Express, PBS' Mediawatch, Wired, Bloomberg Businessweek, and the Washington Post have published similar, scolding pieces. A narrative was cemented: Yelp is a Goliath, a bully. Or to use the metaphor favored by many, the mafia: You pay for advertising or it kills your business. This is how we want, or need, to think of the faceless, monolithic tech companies upon which we're dependent. But what if that's completely wrong?

The Hagertys can't actually prove they were extorted; nor can, it seems, any other small business owner who's made this claim. When interviewed, the Hagertys won't even say that the claim their sign made is in fact true. Salakjit Hagerty, who talked with the Yelp salesperson, does not speak English well. Larry, who wrote the sign, admits he was never on the phone with anyone from Yelp. Does he definitely know what was said to his wife? "I can't say definitely because I didn't speak to them," he says. At first he says "every" positive review of the business disappeared from the site; when reminded Yelp only contacts businesses with three-star overall ratings or higher, he goes silent.

"We have as much right to put the sign in the window as Yelp does to have a website," he finally says. "Her intent was never for it to get this far."

Some may find all the fuss a bit silly. But Yelp's influence is not to be understated: The site and app receive 102 million unique visitors each month. It's estimated they have 39 million reviews of 1.1 million businesses. Every other second someone calls a business via the app alone. It's now reached into nearly every domestic market, plus 21 foreign nations and counting. A Google comparison demonstrates that for every 97 searches on Yelp, there are 10 for UrbanSpoon and zero for CitySearch.

Such ubiquity has consequences. A study from last year found that a measly half-star difference made it 19% more likely that a San Francisco restaurant would be busy at peak times. The converse is also true: Bad Yelp ratings can be fatal. Businesses have no choice but to be listed on the site; they have no control in what's said about them, nor how results are ordered or filtered. With that lack of control comes anger. And with anger comes misinformation.