Blog at your own risk

What can you do about blog or discussion board postings that simply aren’t true or are offensive?

A growing number of folks are hiring attorneys to sue for defamation, but court battles over Internet content are still new, so there’s no telling how these cases eventually will work out.

People who post to blogs or discussion boards are supposed to follow rules set by the blog or board host. Normally, that means not writing things that are harmful, harassing, abusive, threatening, vulgar or obscene, among other prohibitions. Most times, you can find the policies written in the “Terms of Service” found at the bottom of a Web page.

Break the rules, and the comments may be deleted automatically by the blog host or erased following complaints of abuse. But that might not do the trick. The problem is that once posted, defamatory comments often permanently appear in the search-engine results for a person or entity. This can even occur after providers remove the original offending comment.

Discussion boards usually do not allow authors to remove or update messages already posted. Let’s face it; there is no such thing as a formal retraction in the blogosphere.

And that’s not where the bad news ends. You might feel tempted to respond to the posting, but in doing so, you may make matters worse.

Source: Lawrence H. Kolin (via Orlando Sentinel)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 12:07 am and is filed under Search News, Technology and Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.