Our business is being regularly damaged by nasty, very personal and seriously biased posts on a thread on your site. We can’t stop it. I don’t like to read it, it makes me crazy-- but periodically a client will point it out to me and people who google us fairly consistently wind up there–why not? “Chronicle of the Horse” sounds authoritative. When they read these old spiteful posts, from what some have posted about their reactions, we get shot out of the water by petty middle school back-aisle gossip before many people have even given us a thought. Incidents that refer to something that may or may not have happened decades ago, and certainly didn’t happen the way they are posted, are reported as if they are current, and they sit there festering-- or we get nasty posts from people who never have met us or seen the work we do. These are vicious attacks on a public person and the business he and his family, his staff and theirs, depend on for a living.
Short of having a staff member solely dedicated to countering this stuff, which simply shows up as defensive anyway, we’d sure like it if someone from the Chronicle would step in and clean it out of the system. The COTH forum is costing us money and hurting our business. It’s damaging us, it’s defaming us, and the user rules specifically say that is not permitted. But…where’s the moderator?
Is anyone from the Chronicle reading these posts to the moderator? I believe there’s something seriously, maybe legally wrong with providing an unmoderated forum.
Talk to me.
