LSTU E-120: Internet and Society: Technology and Politics of Control

Outline: Assignment 3

Instructor: Andy Sellars

TAs: Ryan Budish and David O’Brien

Chanel Rion

March 31, 2015

Submit an outline of your project, including a description of what you plan to present in terms of observations about the community, what pieces you plan to use to ground your analysis. If you are taking an empirical approach, describe how you will structure your observations and data gathering.

Project Outline

Part 1: Identifying the Community

A brief introduction to Sitejabber; identifying what distinguishes it in the world of online consumer-review platforms – namely, how it differs from its bigger and more dominant cousin Yelp.com regarding how the reviewers transfer information about a business or service and how the rest of the community is able to verify or to confirm the review’s veracity. A comparison will also be made regarding how Sitejabber accommodates for businesses to respond to reviews compared to Yelp’s policies and methods.

Included in this section of the presentation will be contextual statistics about how many users and reviews are on the site. This will be gathered from secondary sources such as Alexa or Sitejabber.

Part 2: How Sitejabber is Structured for the Consumers and for Businesses -- Challenges

This part of the presentation will be an elaboration about how Sitejabber’s policies are followed by users and the connection between how the site frames its service to the customers, how it frames its service to the businesses, and how it frames its service to reviewers. An analysis of how users are able to express themselves and represent themselves credibly on Sitejabber will be made; preferably finding frequent reviewers or reviewers who have received some measure of high credibility from fellow users.

Differences will be highlighted between Sitejabber and Yelp regarding the user experiences. Sitejabber’s particular challenges will be addressed here regarding verification by studying reviewer-generated patterns on businesses with positive, negative, and mixed reviews. A different business on Sitejabber will be selected for each of these review qualities to be used as exhibits for analysis.

Part 3: How Different Actors Navigate Around this Issue

A specific business featured on Sitejabber will be chosen for analysis; it will have a clear disparity in reviewer satisfaction levels – one with seemingly conflicting customer reportage. The same will be executed for the comparative analysis with Yelp. A second lens of analysis will be to choose a single business that is reviewed both on Sitejabber and on Yelp for the most comprehensive comparison.

This part will be in four subsections to be tended to with the same methodology where applicable: Reviewers, Sitejabber, Businesses, and Readers. Within each subsection analysis will follow regarding how Reviewers, Sitejabber, Businesses, and Readers navigate the issue of reviewer veracity.

Part 4: How These Modes of Control Regulate the Community – Positively and Negatively

A comparative study between how Yelp and Sitejabber approach their roles as “intermediaries” between users and businesses under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Legal cases and negative publicity against Sitejabber and Yelp will be cited to determine the trend of cases and how/if the outcomes of these cases have changed the way that Sitejabber mediates its role as intermediary between consumers and online businesses.

Some conclusions should be drawn regarding Sitejabber’s particular differences from Yelp and other reviewer sites through this perspective.

Pros and cons of Sitejabber’s current status quo will be presented.

The sources for this portion of the paper will be drawn from technology news outlets such as Arstechnica and mainstream news sources such as the New York Times. From the readings, this paper will draw mainly from the Ardia article on Section 230 and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act itself.

LIST OF RELATED MATERIALS AND SOURCES

Sitejabber and Sitejabber’s

User Guideline

Yelp and Yelp’s

User Guideline

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

The CDA itself

David Ardia’s “Free Speech Savior or Shield for Scoundrels” article

Alexa.com

Yochai Benkler’s discussion on Truthiness and the Networked Public Sphere

Reports and Bloggers on legal cases related to Sitejabber and Yelp

Arstechnica

New York Times