Urge your congressional delegation to amend Section 230 to provide the same protections for individuals as is provided to copyright holders under the DMCA. That is that if a website is notified of content that is defamatory they must remove the material and notify the poster. If the poster can prove that the content is not defamatory it can go back up. The framework is already in place for websites to handle these issues.

The whole idea of reviews is about money for the website anyway. They encourage people to post – even buying TV ads. They know that negative reviews will predominate but they do not care because the traffic the reviews generate means they can charge more for advertising on the site. Section 230 is all about protecting the website operators bottom line. Also, it seems that there may be interconnecting ownership of review websites and reputation management businesses — so that these companies are now selling services to cure a problem that they create.

Please contact your congressional delegation often until this is addressed.

“If a business manages to sue someone that left defamatory reviews unjustly and wins, Google is under no obligation even then to pull the reviews down.”

Thanks for helping me understand the issue.

Under a normal scenario, you would sue all parties who republished the malicious defamation, and seek injunctive relief to have the bogus crap taken down.

Online reviews can easily, and are already substantially interfering with small businesses already suffering.

Panzer brings up one of the issues with the law. However there is a second issue that I find even more pernicious.

If a business manages to sue someone that left defamatory reviews unjustly and wins, Google is under no obligation even then to pull the reviews down.

At some point the internet companies need to be held to the standard that society sets. Complete immunity AFTER the fact makes no sense to me.

Again, proof that that a law so structured works is Europe.

Your argument misses the point. Anyone can create a FAKE user acct and post bogus, defamatory reviews. Competitors already do this same idea w adwords by hiring overseas companies to click your daily bid budgets away.

SEO companies are now basically calling businesses and blackmailing them, trying to sell them “reputation protection.” This online review thing is totally nefarious and shields evil doers. The only answer is to abide by the common law and tell congress to repeal this completely unconstitutional law that enable competitors and evil SEO companies to destroy each other with ZERO repercussions.

We need to have the right to sue third party defamers, no matter who they are and where they are. The only identifiable party in 99 percent of this defamation are sites like Google, Yahoo!, Yelp, etc. Google should know better.

A publicly traded company should not hide behind an UNJUST law. They should have a verification process, as well as an opt out process that allows businesses who dont want reviews on their businesses, without harming their search results.

You cannot sue some guy in India hidden behind a network of proxies and servers.

Now I’m to the point of trying to create a solution, and I know this place is a great one to kick around ideas. How about this, Mike: Someone create a company that gets hired by local businesses to advise/scare they’re competitor companies that are posting fake reviews to stop doing so. Since fake reviews are a punishable offense, as we have seen in New York, why not take what information is given (there are many clues to identifying fake reviews) and address this with X company through a middleman. I think this company could do its job without harassing.

I’d pay upwards of $1000 for my competitors to stop posting fake reviews/take them down, and I’m a small business.

I know the ultimate solution lies with google and other review providers to turn down the juice that gives reviews so much weight with local search, or amend 230, but this seems like a legitimate attempt to stop these frauds now.

But then I start to worry about the fact that I want laws tighter. It’s the age-old question of who gets to arbitrate what is decent? Who gets to decide? Such a question runs the gamut from separation of church and state to allowing racial hatred groups to parade up and down in front of the White House to banning books.

Suddenly, I feel overwhelmed by the problem. Our society dictates that certain acts constitute criminal behavior (against the law). We’ve lived with such laws for so long that they seem like givens to all of us, I think, but it becomes less clear when we are dealing with things like speech, junk on the Internet, etc. I’m not totally sure how to think my way through this.

Just last night, I was looking up old Sesame Street skits for fun and was completely disgusted to see that pornographers are including the name of this children’s show in their YouTube video titles that have absolutely nothing to do with Sesame Street. I’d like to see this stuff wiped off the face of the Earth, frankly, and never fail to be disturbed when encountering the ill wishes and thoughts of others. I guess we would need to fall back on democracy to take, in a sense, a national poll as to what is decent and what isn’t, and let our acts and laws reflect this.

Sorry if I’m rambling. The story you’ve published and the question you’ve asked are both deserved of discussion. My heart feels very strongly about what would be ‘right’, in my opinion, in a case like this, but when faced with moral dilemmas, I find that including government in the subject muddies my thinking.

r