General Discussion
They don't like it up'em
Watch Your Talk, Town Council Tells Website Owner
News Editor Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Dawlish Town Council has asked the owner of www.dawlish.com to remove or censor its discussion forum and guest book after it was unanimously agreed by the financial and general purposes committee on Thursday.
The move came after the council received a letter from a man in Newton Abbot stating that 'diatribe comments and character defamation' were taking place on the site leading to loss of business.
The letter read:
‘As an employee of one of the many small businesses in Dawlish it has come to my attention that your webpage www.dawlish.com which is supposed to present Dawlish positively is being misused to the point that we are losing trade because you are inaccurately portraying our business endeavours, our livelihoods and our jobs in an adverse way by allowing a 'Guestbook' where drunken individuals are placing ads and a 'Discussion' where all manner of ill advised comments that destroy the hard work of persons involved in trade in the town because a small number of people decide it would be fun to ruin another company's hard work.
I would kindly request that the 'Guestbook' and 'Discussion', or diatribe comments of character defamation and comments likely to cause loss of business entire options be removed from the webpage as it is setting Dawlish up to lose customers from wherever it is possible to log on to the internet with such a centralised webpage address as 'Dawlish'.
Instead of representing the town, in its current form with the 'Guestbook' and 'Discussion' Dawlish, its reputation for quality and a place to stay are being ruined and the livelihoods and jobs of the people in the town with your webpage.’
Councillors said if the website took no action it would provide the name and address of the website contacts for anyone requesting information.
Dawlish.com was unavailable for comment.
Ithink you will find the webmaster did respond to the town council via this website on the 21st march 2007
As far as I am aware, the website and webmaster is not liable for the comments on a forum site whether libellous or not. The liability rests with the user of the IP address, which is of course trackable.
This has been tested in Court and precedents therefore exist.
So the webmaster can disregard the bullying and threats, and the councillors had better start realizing that they are accountable and their actions are subject to negative interpretation. If they don't like it they are under no compulsion to stand in elections.