Streisand Effect : restaurant sues a bad review and gets bad publicity

In France, you're allowed to write a bad review about a restaurant in your blog, but apparently, you're not allowed to be referenced by Google too high, or you could get sued.

Photo used in the original post

This is what happened to Caroline Doudet, under the name "L'Irrégulière" on her blog Les Chroniques Culturelles, when she shared her disappointment about a dinner she had at Il Giardino in Cap Ferret, southwest of France. She deleted the blog post after the judgement, although it is still accessible on archive.org. For those who can't read French, the opinion column is titled "The place to avoid in Cap Ferret: Il Giordano", it is a chronological description of what happened that evening, from the moment they entered the restaurant until the check and finishes with "I incite you to blacklist [the restaurant] if you come in the area" followed by the address.

Her complaints in the whole post are numerous: bad service (with multiple examples), unfriendly and non-business-minded owner, low quality meals. Her points are backed by examples and we can feel the unpleasantness of the dinner through the words.

Ten months later, the disappointed customer got fined 2,500€ for "denigration" (1,500€ for the restaurant, 1,000€ for the justice fees) and constrained to change the title of her blog post (as I mentioned earlier, she decided to delete it altogether instead).

The restaurant, primarily but non-exclusively serving pizzas, thought they had won. That dreadful publicity, ranked on the first page on Google searches, was doomed to disappear. That was without thinking of the repercussions of that conviction. Media recounted the judgement. To nobody's surprise though, potential customers were not happy with the decision and started giving bad reviews on websites like TripAdvisor (with one listing it as Streisand favorite restaurant and grading it one star out of five a few days ago) or on Google Plus (average of 1.3 out of 5 after 194 reviews).

For those unaware, this is called the Streisand Effect. By trying to censor something they considered bad (reportedly, before the judgement, the page had been read less than 500 times), they created a negative internet buzz that reached hundreds of times that number.

A little piece of advice to the owner: the best response to that review was not to censor it, but to prove it was wrong by providing a good service that would call for good reviews. Free speech, even though attacked from all sides, is a concept that people are very attached to, and any blow towards it will probably have a negative effect on the attacker. I'm even sure that if the fine had been higher, Caroline Doudet wouldn't have had to pay it but the internet would have organized to help her raise that money.

This is one of the most noticeable market effect. I know I won't ever go eat in that restaurant. Without that judgement, it was possible. Thanks to the defense of free speech, I got to read that blog post that I would never have read otherwise. You'll never see me, Il Giardano.