That filter is supposed to filter out reviews made by business owners themselves or by competition so that the resulting review is truly representative of the real customers review. However, in the case of Cleopatra's Restaurant in Greensboro, NC as well as the case of thousand other small businesses, yelp seems to intentionally want to filter it out good reviews and leaves bad reviews. In my case, this happened after I refused to advertise on their website. I also checked people reviews of Yelp itself on yelp.com and it seems that the filter which is supposed to be unbiased filters out bad reviews to make them less bad than how they already are. So how it comes that genius filter filters out the good reviews from listing and the same filters out the bad review we s from yelp listing???

If you read the filtered reviews on yelp listing you will find thousands of business owners complaining about the same thing. You will find thousands more complaining that their first amendment right is violated. Of course on ed can resort to legal venues, however in this economy, do you the I'm not small business owners can afford battling a well established wealthy company such as Yelp?

This issue relates to the very fundamental rights we have in this country, freedom of speech, it also relates to thousands and thousands of small businesses upon which our economy today relies, and millions of jobs are in question. We can't allow a company such as Yelp to hijack or black mail us.

I request that Yelp Filter be taken down, or it is implemented the right try way.