Taiwanese Food Blogger Gets 30 Days in the Slammer for Negative Review
Not too long ago, the PR firm behind the long-awaited video game Duke Nukem Forever threatened to punish any sites that ran negative reviews of the game. For a few days, the controversy seemed all anyone in the video game blogging world could talk about.
People were shocked! Shocked! How could a PR company be so crass as to say any negative review of their game would result in a site essentially getting blackballed from receiving advance review copies of other games in the future?
That’s total first-world problem dude, because some blogger in Taiwan just got thrown in jail for writing that a restaurant’s beef noodles were “too salty” in a review.
Well, technically, the blogger was punished with 30 days in detention and two years of probation, along with a hefty fine, because the judge ruled that the blogger’s criticism of the restaurant exceeded “reasonable bounds,” according to the Taipei Times.
A bit of back story is needed:
The restaurant’s owner, surnamed Yang (楊), learned about Liu’s blog post from a regular customer, and filed charges against her, accusing her of defamation.
The District Court sided with the restaurant owner, a decision that was appealed by Liu. The case went to the Taichung branch of the Taiwan High Court, who ruled that “Liu’s criticism about cockroaches in the restaurant to be a narration of facts, not intentional slander.” But then, they also ruled that Liu should not have criticized all of the restaurant’s food as being “too salty” if she only had one dish and a few sides.
Makes sense. The writer probably should’ve been clear in her review that her specific dish was too salty. But, as if rubbing salt in the wounds of losing a court case twice, health inspection officials visited the restaurant and concluded that conditions weren’t as bad as the review made them out to be.
Like an additional punch to the stomach, “the High Court also ruled that Liu must pay NT$200,000 to the owner for revenues lost as a result of her blog post.” That’s about $7,000 USD.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about this is that it is not uncommon for country’s to have criminal defamation statues.
The owner of the restaurant said he filed the charges because the negative review was responsible for several customers calling him to inquire whether or not the review was true.
He simply could have said, “No, they are not.” But why do that when you can more or less ruin someone’s life for saying your beef noodles are salty? Lord only knows what this owner would have done if they had Twitter, Yelp, Foursquare and City Search in his neck of the woods.
But just so we’re clear: Write a negative review in America and you get threatened with having your video games taken away. Write a quasi-slanderous food review in Taiwan and you end up in jail for a month.
Good times, good times.
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- Jim
