Website slander

[secsee1]

A friend of mine runs a restaurant and just recently customers have told him to look on a certain "recommendations" website, when he looked somebody had written many not only untrue but slanderous and racist comments about the place. He is in the process of contacting the owners of the website to get the comments removed but does he have the right to demand the name and contact information of the offending posters bearing in mind he is losing business over these comments.

[Duncer]

If there are racist comments then I'm sure the police would take action, and so they should.

[237SJ]

Therre`s no way they`ll hand over the poster`s details because if they did that, they would be in breach of the Data Protection Act.

[dzug2]

If the contact details consist of a false name and a throwaway e-mail address the site owner is not going to be able to do much

[Ellipsis]

It's not slander, it's libel.

The usual process is to contact the website owners and ask them to remove it. If they don't remove it then it effectively becomes something they[i have said, rather than the person that originally wrote it. Your friend can then take action against [i]them].

If it's a matter for the police then the police can get the names and addresses of the posters, or at least the details that may allow them to track the posters down. Your friend, however, can't.

All of this assumes that the website is based in the UK. If it's elsewhere, things get a lot more difficult ...

[secsee1]

Thanks for your answers everybody, my friend is just about to contact the website owners (UK based) and also as the racist comments were so bad he is contacting the police as well, but not holding his breath about them doing anything.

[ojread2]

If it is truly that bad and contains such comments, then I imagine it has more than likely been reported already and is being looked at by the powers that be on TA

[FredPuli43]

Pretty sure there's been a recent case [which, inevitably, I can't presently track down via google] on Data Protection and disclosure in libel actions when the owners of a website refused to disclose the name of the originator of the alleged libel. It was held that the Act was to protect the individual not the website owner. If that individual published a libel via the website, it was no answer for him to claim that his rights under the Act were infringed by his identity being disclosed to the person libelled, for otherwise the most libellous lies would be published with impunity.It followed that the website could not resist an application for disclosure, a pleadable cause of action for libel being shown.

Even in the absence of suitable binding authority, the argument appears sound common, and legal, sense.

[Dodger666]

This teenager got charged for racist comments on Facebook.

http://www.dailymail....lled-Afghanistan.html

[Mosaic]

Malicious Communications Act. It's against the Law, it's intended to cause upset, and it is as much an offence as a mugging. Insist you local plod take action and ask for an incident number plus the plod's id when you make your complaint.