For years, Rip Off Report, Google, Complaints Board and various bloggers have been hiding behind the term “user generated content” and the idea that “it’s not our content, we just list it” to remain liability-free for false statements on their websites. The problem for me is that these companies are making a profit from said content. In Rip Off Report, for example, there are advertisements everywhere (often contextually-based from the company listed). In Google, there are sponsored results related to the company or person you typed in to get the content. In my opinion, the moment you are making money on content is the moment you should be liable for the content on your website.

Just because it’s not on printed paper does not mean websites shouldn’t be held responsible for their content. Newspapers and magazines, which have been sued successfully for many years if they publish false statements, are off the shelves and out of our minds within the day (if a newspaper) or a month (if a magazine). For all intensive purposes, the Web is permanent. News from six years ago can usually be found in a minute or so. In many cases, it is brought back from the dead years later and highly visible in search results for years to come.

The fact that website publishers like Rip Off Report are hiding behind free speech and “user generated content” is ridiculous. As I currently write the blog post you are reading I am making a profit at some level, and they do too, whether it is advertising, lead generation, or any other means. If they are making money, it is up to them to regulate statements or be liable for false ones.

A tough question for me to answer is if search engines like Google or Yahoo, which have massive influence on what hundreds of millions of people read each day, should be liable if they are posting untrue and damaging data? I understand the quick answer is “it would be impossible for them to weed this stuff out; they are dealing with billions of pages.” But in the same way it is making you tens of millions of dollars in revenue each day  at some level, so it seems like they should be liable if they are riddling consumers with false and slanderous content.

What makes everything worse is that 90% of the time, people are publishing this content anonymously or using fake/false identities. Maybe it is as simple as sites like Rip Off Report mandating proof of identity and not allowing anonymous or fake identities to publish opinions. If you have something to say about someone, and you believe it to be true, why give them a forum to hide? It just makes it too easy. People’s professional and personal lives are being ruined with no way to fight, respond or prove to the world otherwise. At the very least, the accused person should have the ability to prove it is untrue, confront the person writing about them and get the content removed if false. This can be done with a simply authorizing a persons credit card for $0.00 just to see if the name matches. They can do this, they choose not to.

I still think we are years away from this type of mass change to occur online, but it will happen one day, just as it did for the magazines and newspaper industries.

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