14 DAY TRIAL // A French blogger was ordered by a judge to pay a substantial fine for leaving a bad review to a restaurant. The issue, it seems, was that this particular review became prominent in search results and harmed business at the restaurant.
The post has since been removed, but it can still be viewed in some online archives. The restaurant in question, Il Giardino, may very well have made the worst decision ever by taking the case to court since now it’s getting even more bad reviews, Eater.com reports.
Caroline Doudet, a blogger with some 3,000 followers, wrote a review about the restaurant which landed the result as the fourth on Google searches for the location. The review wasn’t that scandalous and it didn’t differ from many others out there – a basic critique to the restaurant’s services with a humorous spin.
Instead of taking care of the issues that she was pointing out in the review, the restaurant made the bad call of taking the case to court, which guaranteed that it would get some extra attention, and not of the good kind.
Doudet has been fined with €1,500 (€2,040), and also has to pay €1,360 ($1.840) in court costs, as well as to edit the title of the blog, which translates into “The place to avoid in Cap-Ferret: Il Giardino.”
The decision is one that goes against the simple right to freedom of expression, on top of the fact that the entire thing is completely ridiculous. Il Giardino may have managed to shake off one bad review, but the publicity the case got, along with the actual review that highlights a disastrous client service, will likely damage the restaurant beyond repair.
Now, all results for Il Giardino lead to news reports about its decision to censor a bad review.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time such a thing happens. It is not exactly uncommon for businesses to try to bury bad reviews and take them down from Google’s search results pages or to get them to vanish completely.
Such moves are obvious actions against people’s right to have an opinion and to express it freely on the Internet.
Back in May, Amazon got a lot of praise after kicking out a company that was planning to sue a reviewer that had left an opinion which quickly climbed to the top, becoming the “most helpful” feedback. The company, Mediabridge, threatened the reviewer with a lawsuit, accusing the customer of waging an illegal campaign to discredit and defame them.
Amazon swiftly stepped in and revoked the company’s selling privileges.