Recent Blog Entries
What would you do if a company asked you to remove content?
Written by Tyme White on June 25, 2008
Many bloggers/writers state an opinion in their articles. Sometimes it is a formal review or it could be someone sharing an experience they had. What would you do if the company or person you were talking about contacted you and requested that you remove the article? This situation happens often. Reading Ars Technica, Atari went after a site over their negative review. The site received a copy of the game early, not via the publisher, and Atari claims the site did not respect the embargo on the game. If the site received the game via the publisher that would make sense, however, the site allegedly received the game earlier via retail. The site claims Atari pulled their advertising campaign with them in retaliation. In another example, a blogger wrote a negative restaurant review and the restaurant owner called their job to complain about it.
I know, you’re thinking that you don’t write reviews and this couldn’t or wouldn’t happen to you. What about when you have a bad experience with a company and you blog about it? What if that company contacted you and wanted to sue? Honestly, you don’t hear companies going off when they are written about in a positive light. You have a lousy flight experience, you write about your experience and a week or two later the airline is threatening you. What do you do?
That’s something to research. What are the laws in your area? Do you want to fight for your rights or do you not care and you’ll just remove the article? What are the goals of your site and how do the answers to those questions fit in with your future plans?
Many people get online and write without really thinking through the possible repercussions of what they do; until it is too late (action has already been taken against you). The longer one writes online the more experienced one becomes in these areas. Some people decide to fight it tooth and nail. Others remove the article in question (or does whatever it takes not to go to court) to resolve the issue quickly. One response isn’t “better” than the other – it depends on your goals for you site. So, to get the ball rolling:
If you received a request to remove an article where you expressed your opinion or experience about a company or service, would you fight it or would you remove the article? The sad point in situations like this, the law might be on the writer’s side but the writer would have to spend resources to have the law recognized in their favor. Some people or companies have to learn that negative criticism will come…learn from it.
June 25th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
What is the worst that a company can do? Ban you from using their service or just send threatening emails?
There isn’t anything illegal about writing a review of a company. In some cases, there is legality of how the person was able to find out about the product, as in the Atari case. Or, if you signed an NDA you definitely shouldn’t be blogging about it.
Other than that, a company has no legal recourse for forcing you to not write about them. (That is, if you are in a country with free speech laws.)
June 25th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Free speech doesn’t mean you can do and say whatever you want. There are restrictions.
June 25th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
The only situation in which I would remove legitimate content would be if they sue me. They might not be able to win, but I don’t have the cash to stick around and play the game. Unless the EFF or some group showed up to rescue me!
June 25th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
I’ve been asked to remove content from my film site quite a number of times, and rather than fight it I’ve gone with it because it’s in my interest to be nice to the studios and marketing companies.
However on my personal blog I wrote about a company I used in the UK, and while my review was okay, the comments afterwards from others were not. When I started appearing above some of the legitamite company websites in Google, the head of the company was onto me.
This isn’t a small company either, the guy is a TV personality as well, and he phoned me personally at home on a holiday weekend to get me to remove the post.
We talked for a while and reached an agreement where I removed anything that could be construed to be derogatory or inflammatory. However he called back the next day and wanted everything removed. I said no, and like the commenters here, talked of freedom of speech, their opinion etc.
The next day I received a letter from the MD threatening legal action, and the following day a letter from their solicitors.
What followed was a legal debate between their solicitors and myself. They were an awful company, sending draft letters instead of completed ones, asking for the site to be deleted in one statement and the post in another, oh it was terrible.
However when I eventually talked to a solicitor about the situation, after a lengthy exchange and realising that they wouldn’t back down, I was told that the battle wasn’t worth it.
In the UK I had no proven rights as yet. In the U.S. there is the law about common carriers of information (as long as you don’t edit anything) however that law doesn’t apply here and I would end up being a test case.
Even if I did win, well I would have lost everything by that point, and I was told that this “gentleman” had a reputation for going after people regardless of right or wrong.
I had to back down or it was going to court as a test case and I was going to lose a bundle of cash.
In the UK bloggers have little rights, and even then they can still be crushed by big companies with time and cash to spend trying to save their reputations.
June 25th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Whether or not I’d get in a legal fight depends on a lot of factors (my financial situation, passion about the contested piece, etc). I can’t really say in advance what I’d do.
That said, I have once been asked to change something by an interested party. Because I respect the organization–the X Prize Foundation–I complied. Though their approach off-puttingly lawyerly, I thought it was not a big enough deal to keep their name in this work of fiction.
Certainly in other situations — like the aforementioned reviews — the identification with a real company/product would be a lot more important, and I’d have to think a great deal harder about what to do.
June 26th, 2008 at 6:26 am
Thank you Richard and David for sharing your experiences.
Richard: Unfortunately even though we have laws in the US many bloggers “give up” their rights (for example by editing comments) or because the US is a litigious, end up backing down because of the resources it would take to fight a case (even if they would win).
David: Companies fail to realize that how they approach a writer can make a big difference in their response.
Daniel: I feel ya. For many even if the funds were there they still wouldn’t want to be bothered with it.
June 26th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Tyme,
Name the restrictions upon free speech that a bad review would fall under.
Yes, I know that it wouldn’t be worth it to fight to court. But, if it got there the blogger would undoubtedly win–in the US, unless another law is broken in the process, we have a right to free speech.
June 26th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
That’s my point Arthus, the person writing the review would have to know the rules of the game (what could be said and shouldn’t) not to fall into a situation that could get them into trouble. It depends HOW the review is written. I mean Jeff was fired from Gamespot for his accurate yet blunt video game review. The company pulled their advertising and of course instead of suing, Jeff was fired (the official story was that he wasn’t fired for that but the video being taken down, the advertising pulled, other videos Jeff did being removed and a bunch of other stuff make it too much of a coincidence to be believable). In his video review people could see the game so he couldn’t boast beautiful graphics or easy gameplay when people were watching. He was honest but honesty (unless done very carefully and accurately) can fall into defamation territory.
June 27th, 2008 at 10:16 am
There are several reasons I do not write negative reviews.
1. Anytime I have read negative reviews, more often than not, I feel the writer has an ax to grind or had placed an unreasonable expectation upon the product/service. This usually leaves me with a worse impression of the writer than the product/service — why would I want to emulate that?
2. Negative reviews still point readers eyes toward the thing I didn’t like. There is an old axiom about “any press is good press,” or something like that.
3. I am busy and there are so many other good things to write about; why waste my time? Specifically, I write about travel and genuinely want to promote it. I want to encourage more people traveling, not less.
On the business side of things. In most cases I could do a review and get away with it. But it might come back to haunt me later. It takes work to develop a network of reliable sources, and it is so much easier just to pass and wait until I am passionate about an experience or product worth my time taking about.
Having said all this, I will point out downsides, when safety might be an issue, or mistakes I have made that could be avoided with more information. If a company asked me to pull story, I probably would after a discussion as to why. Still, I am grateful that it hasn’t happened yet.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Tyme, yes that is absolutely true. However, he was fired internally and the company pulled advertising–not a lawsuit. There are many ways a company can try to get at you, but generally the bigger the blog/site the more prone to attack. On my small site, nobody could fire me and there is no advertising to be pull. It just shows that when working for others you need to think about the consequences for the whole company, and not just the individual review.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Do you really think that because you have nothing now that’s a reason not to pursue you? It’s the small sites that quietly settle because they don’t have the means to fight. The EFF doesn’t take every case that comes their way. Easy way for a company to win (because you can’t fight) and get that house you one day will have but don’t have now to pay off the damages.
Of course you have the right to think for some reason you are exempt but that’s what everyone thought until it happened to them.
June 28th, 2008 at 7:10 am
I wouldn’t settle, period. If I am in the legal right, I would not back down. Companies do not have a legal right to run the world, and I would not let them take that right. Sure, maybe it would cost my life’s savings in legal fees: in the end, I know I will win. Corporations do not have the right to push around the little guy just because the little guy can’t finance a case, and I would do whatever it takes to fight my case and not back down.
This may sound idealistic and irrational, (I am a teen after all :P) but I firmly believe in justice above all else.
July 12th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
In the UK there are no laws that defend the right of the blogger or publisher of others comments, and libel and slander would definitely win over free speech - the problem is that there isn’t a law in the UK that says you can say whatever you want about anyone.
The real thing to consider though is money. We don’t have as much as a company with millions in the bank, so we can’t pay for lawyers in a court case that is drawn out for years while the company can - that’s how they win and that’s why people like me back down.
July 15th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
“Many people get online and write without really thinking through the possible repercussions of what they do; until it is too late”
This is something that all of us (myself included) need to think about. Early on in my Internet days, I wasn’t very careful about anything I said. About 2.5 years ago, I picked up a cyber stalker who hammers me on my anime blog and my personal blog at times. I don’t read his blatherings as they are automatically archived for law enforcement but this made me aware of how I’d not been very careful about what I’ve said over the years. Indeed, I think I need to exercise even greater caution about what I say when it comes to personal stuff.
That said, if FUNimation or Viz hit me because they didn’t like something I said about one of their titles in my anime/manga blog, I think I’d call their bluff because I’d be so angry, especially if I thought that I’d done nothing wrong.
From the other side of things, I can understand people at a company getting upset when something they’ve worked so hard on gets trashed.
Regardless, your article is a good reminder to me to think about what I write. Thanks!
August 5th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
I do some reviews as part of Answer Fitness and I’ve yet had anyone ask me to remove a review.
A few months ago I wrote a review of Planet Fitness — a somewhat controversial gym franchise — that I believed was balanced and fair. It wasn’t a glowing review, nor was it a hatchet job. It climbed its way up to #2 in the SERPS for the Planet Fitness brand term on Google and a bunch of tail terms (it’s since dropped thanks to last week’s Google PageRank update.) So it had a lot of visibility.
I was surprised one morning when the CEO of Planet Fitness, Mike Grondahl, stopped by and left a comment on the article. He provided some background on the company, asked how anyone could know as much about his company as I did (I worked out there) and said he generally thought the article was fair.
This was exactly the way I would have handled it had I been in his shoes. He didn’t ask me to change anything, or make any corrections — he engaged in a dialogue.
Ironically, a few weeks ago, the manager of the Planet Fitness I belong to came to me with a long list of points that he thought I should cover in the review (apparently they saw it as well.) I told him to go up and leave a comment on the review with his side of things. His response was “I’m not good with technology.” I have corrected a few things based on that feedback, but the basic review stands. I would have preferred that he comment, but you know … that “technology” thing.
On matters of fact, I am constantly striving to be as accurate as possible. If I get something wrong, I want someone to point it out so I can correct it. I’m not unlike a newspaper in that regard. Setting the record straight is important.
On matters of personal opinion, I will allow alternative views (and actually encourage them) via comments — but I would never remove or redact a blog post because it rubbed a company wrong. Period.
Why am I so confident of that? Primarily because I have a fair amount of knowledge of libel in the context of journalism. And let’s face it, no matter what traditional, mainstream journalists might say, my writing is really no different from what is written in health magazines or the Fitness section of the local daily. I’m diligent in how I characterize companies and people, and feel pretty confident that if challenged legally, I can hold my own.
The problem is that many bloggers haven’t had any training in libel law, so they don’t understand that with some minor changes to how they write, they can generally avoid any serious issues here.
That doesn’t mean that you won’t get calls from CEOs, lawyers or individuals when you publish an article that is critical of their product or service, but this happens with traditional journalists all the time. You just have to be armed with the knowledge of what you can and can’t say and be willing to stand on the facts, and your personal integrity.
Also, most companies will respond favorably if you engage them in a reasonable dialogue and invite them to participate in telling their side of the story. This can go a long way to alleviate potential conflicts. You don’t need to change or delete your original content (unless of course it is factually incorrect) — you just need to offer equal opportunity.
Great post …
August 11th, 2008 at 4:45 am
“The problem is that many bloggers haven’t had any training in libel law, so they don’t understand that with some minor changes to how they write, they can generally avoid any serious issues here.”
That’s a huge generalisation there Matt. Yes, some of the problem is that bloggers writing is opening them up to libel claims, however there are bloggers who can write to avoid these.
The big problem I encountered was how people commented on my site and what happened when I edited them and became a publisher rather than a common carrier - a definition that doesn’t exist in UK law for bloggers as yet.
August 22nd, 2008 at 8:21 am
Richard, I’m not so sure that it’s such a huge generalization. Yes, there are pro and experienced bloggers who are very versed in libel law (or have some formal journalism training,) but it’s become so easy to start a blog now, that it’s really opened everthing up to the masses. And I feel pretty confident in saying that that Average Joe or Jane blogger has never picked up a libel manual and probably has very little knowledge of how to phrase things to keep yourself out of court.
That said, I understand that the UK has very different protections (or lack there of) for bloggers, so your larger point is well taken. Even the CDA here in the US is still hazy on when “editing” for grammar or punctuation crosses over into collaboration in comments left on a site. So many bloggers play it safe by not touching comments (even to correct typos) and publishing them as-is.