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.

Why I am a libertarian

I have not always called myself a libertarian. To be honest, a few years back I didn't even know the word. I have always felt a strong admiration for the concept of freedom.

I've been raised in a far from wealthy family, who struggled every month to make ends meet. Historically, the whole of my family has also always leaned to the left side of politics, sometimes very left. In certain ways, I follow them. In many others I don't. Libertarianism is neither left nor right.

I had preconceived beliefs that led me to doubt the fact that freedom could be the most efficient response to some problems in the world. Over the years, after hours and hours of reading, studying, questioning, I am deeply convinced of the efficiency of liberty.

In addition to that, on a philosophical note, I believe freedom to be the absolute highest moral value to fight for in the world. I'm now going to list three illustrative examples that are at the core of my libertarianism, among tens of others that I might expose in another post someday.

1. Freedom of Speech

Strange it is that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free speech but object to their being "pushed to an extreme", not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case.

 John Stuart Mill

I don't know anyone who would say that Freedom of Speech is a bad thing. But I've heard and seen so many times comments like "Of course freedom of speech is important, but hateful Nazi websites should be shut down". If Freedom of Speech is not complete and unconditional, then it doesn't exist.

If you only advocate Freedom of Speech for the opinions that you support, you don't advocate it at all. I despise Nazi people as much as anyone ever could (in addition to having awful racial beliefs, they are huge defenders of an all powerful state), but I would never censor anything such a person would have to say by law. That doesn't mean that I endorse their beliefs. If an opinion of that type were to be published on any post of my blog in the comment section, I would delete it. I don't want to relay these comments on my blog. And that is in perfect agreement with Freedom of Speech. This is my blog. If I decide I don't want to see something appear on it, it's my right to delete it. I don't want to be associated with it. If that same person creates their own blog to publish these concepts though, I would have nothing to say.

2. No laws can abolish a contract between consenting adults

The whole duty of government is to prevent crime and to preserve contracts.

Lord Melbourne

The key word in that quote is "whole". Government has no other duties than these two.

Nowadays, politics are trying to manage everyone's life. The main argument for that is usually to "protect" people. Most of the time though, it's to protect them from themselves. It is NOT any government's job. There's so many examples of that type. Most of them seem very good at first sight. Let's take minimum wages laws: higher wages obviously lead to people with a better financial situation. If the wages are high because of contracts agreed on both parts, that's exactly what it means. Sadly, if wages are raised by law only, there come the multiple drawbacks.

First, a legal minimum wage means that all the activities that are worth less than the foregoing wage will simply disappear. Out of the legal setting, that is. Moonlighting will expand instead. People who have no skills that are worth the legal wage still need the money. Second, an increase in a minimum wage by law that doesn't reflect in an increase in productivity only leads to one thing: inflation. The employer that needs to legally increase wages with no increase in productivity will reverberate his higher costs on his prices. Conclusion: some people (the less skilled) can't find a legal job anymore, minimum wage workers are better paid, but inflation made overall prices increase.

3. Still protecting you from yourself : Drugs

If the government can’t keep drugs away from inmates who are locked in steel cages, surrounded by barbed wire, watched by armed guards, drug-tested, strip-searched, X-rayed, and videotaped – how can it possibly stop the flow of drugs to an entire nation?

Ron Crickenberger

This quote only shows the utterly inefficiency of the War on Drugs. That's the utilitarian argument for the legalization of drugs. Personally, I think drug should be legalize even if the War on Drugs was efficient.

I don't do drugs. Never have, never will. Personal choice, not because it's illegal. If drugs (and I mean all drugs) were legalized, I still wouldn't take it. And I'm sure that most people are the same way. But even if some did... What's wrong with that? You can morally disapprove all you want, a drug user only harms himself. It's his choice. He's responsible for that choice. If someday, he harms someone else, either on drugs or not, he'll be responsible for it. How many people are in prison and have never harmed anyone else but themselves?

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These are just a few small examples of what I believe in and why I define myself as a libertarian. I am open to discussion. The comment section is there for you.