A ‘Top Ten Dirtiest Hotels’ list of an online travel ratings site, based upon user comments and data, has been held not defamatory because a reasonable person would understand the list to be “unverifiable rhetorical hyperbole” rather than a statement of fact, reports Holland & Knight.

In Seaton v. TripAdvisor, LLC, the defendant aggregated opinion of the site’s millions of online users. A Tennessee district court granted the defendant’s motion to dismiss, concluding that the plaintiff failed to plead any facts that showed the defendant made a statement of fact, or a statement of opinion that it intended readers to believe was based on facts.

The court also noted that although the site’s method of arriving at its conclusions (i.e., unverified online user reviews) was “a poor evaluative metric”, it was not a “system sufficiently erroneous so as to be labeled ‘defamatory’ under the legal meaning of the term”.