You Can’t Say That in Public!

This week another story popped up in our ongoing collection of examples that prove life in the Internet age really is different – and that anyone who believes that it isn’t is living in a fool’s paradise. Apparently, according to the story in the Minneapolis – St. Paul Star Tribune , a local contractor was having a dispute with a customer over the quality of some concrete work, and the whole thing had degenerated into a series of court cases, when the customer’s daughter decided to post a bunch of nasty comments about the contractor and his company on Craig’s List. This might have stayed in the grey area, except for the fact that the daughter used actual legal terms (such as “fraud”) in her Craig’s List post, and the terms were not supported by the company’s history or the court records. As a result, the contractor counter-sued for defamation and won…

If you’re a consumer advocate, you probably see this as a case of the company doing crappy work (the original customer won the original customer complaint) and then profiting when they counter-sued. If you’re a small-business advocate (the firm in question has only a few employees) you probably see this as a case of someone attempting to screw money out of the company by threatening to write nasty Craig’s List posts unless they get what they want – and then doing so. If the cases are being reported correctly in the linked article, it would appear that the company did offer to fix the problems, but the customer demanded that they refund their entire fee AND pay the “customer” an additional $800 into the bargain (for a total of $6,200), and the court would only allow the customer $440 for the repairs – which is when the customer’s daughter decided on a smear campaign online…

Now, you and I weren’t there when any of this happened, and we don’t have access to either the original contract or the court documents – but none of these points are being disputed by either party. If this is how it went down, then it does appear to be a customer making unreasonable demands on a company that is just trying to complete their obligations and make a living, and that both the customer and her daughter eventually got their just desserts. A much more interesting point, at least from where I’m sitting, is the complaint about the Craig’s List posting – and the subsequent judgment supporting that complaint…

In the days before there was an Internet, the client’s angry offspring would most likely have told friends, acquaintances, and anyone else in the community who would listen about how badly her mother was treated by this paving contractor, and how no one should ever do business with this company. This would be annoying and unfortunate for the company, and if enough people did it they’d probably have trouble getting new customers, but there wouldn’t have been anything actionable involved, and there would probably have been no occasion to counter-sue. Publicly accusing someone of a crime is another matter, however; even in the old days, you’d probably have been a bit more careful about calling someone a fraud in public, and you’d certainly hesitate before doing so in front of tens of millions of people…

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what you’re doing when you post such accusations on Craig’s List – or anywhere else online. As I’ve noted in some of our previous musings on the information age, in cyberspace everyone can hear your stupid, unfair and ultimately incorrect accusations of wrong-doing – which means that so can the person you’re maligning. And not only is that not likely to change any time soon, as more and more of the world becomes interconnected through the Web, the number of people listening to you rant is only going to get larger. So be careful about what you say in public, because I can almost guarantee you that if the people you’re excoriating aren’t watching you yet, they will be…