Can you be sued for writing a bad review online?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 14 April 2024
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We depend on online reviews for everything from hotel and restaurant bookings, to what products to buy, and as we hear in this programme, medical and cosmetic procedures.
If a customer feels unhappy with a service they've paid for, they might want to leave a bad review. But what happens if the company they're complaining about doesn't like it?
In the UK, a cosmetic surgery company, Signature Clinic, is taking some of its former patients to court after they posted negative reviews or comments on support groups. We hear from some of them.
(Image: A surgeon putting on surgical gloves. Credit: Getty Images)
Presented and produced by Ed Butler
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi there, I'm Ed Butler and this is Business Daily from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:06.3 | Today, what can happen when you write a consumer review that the company doesn't like? |
| 0:12.6 | They were saying that they would take me to court. |
| 0:15.3 | I'd have to pay their costs plus £10,000 in damages, |
| 0:19.7 | that my actions would cause me to end up being |
| 0:24.4 | bankrupt and losing everything. |
| 0:26.8 | Online consumer reviews, we depend on them all the time to judge the companies that we use, |
| 0:32.3 | but can you be sued for writing a rude one and why some company owners say they're being extorted by aggressive |
| 0:40.2 | customers. The patient will say, look, you know, I'm not happy. I want my money back. |
| 0:45.6 | And he said, but you're not happy, but you cannot have your money back because we've done the |
| 0:49.0 | work and everything else. And then the patient will go in post-bought review. And it would be like, hint, hint. If I did get my money back, |
| 0:57.8 | I promise I will take the review down. The rights and wrongs of online reviewing. That's Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:08.6 | On the 4th of May, I went to Cigna Cline, having looked at the various review sites and being quite positive about the good reviews that I read. |
| 1:21.4 | This is Mohamed, a regular citizen from Manchester in the UK. |
| 1:25.9 | He decided he needed cosmetic surgery to help him fix |
| 1:29.1 | persistent bags that were appearing under his eyelids, a quick snip, you might say, to remove |
| 1:35.0 | excess skin. So he turned to signature clinics, a firm which calls itself the UK's leading |
| 1:41.1 | daycare cosmetic surgery clinic, providing affordable treatments at a very high quality. |
| 1:47.7 | As Mohamed says, the reviews did look positive. |
| 1:52.0 | What happened was an excessive amount of skin was taken. |
| 1:56.5 | So as a consequence of that, unfortunately I'm unable to fully close my eyelids. |
| 2:02.2 | Also, I'm having quite a few functional problems. |
... |
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