Fake defendants used as ruse to scrub search results
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One way to get embarrassing information off the internet is to sue fake defendants so that court orders are issued that compel web search companies to remove unwanted photographs and postings.
According to a University of California-Los Angeles professor and a free-speech attorney who examined 25 suspicious-looking court cases in the United States, the cases, initiated by reputation management firms, didn’t ask for money, which tipped the pair off that the suits were “odd.”
They documented their discovery in a recent Washington Post column: “…what’s the point of suing a fake defendant (to the extent that some of these defendants are indeed fake)? How can anyone get any real money from a fake defendant? How can anyone order a fake defendant to obey a real injunction?... Google and various other Internet platforms have a policy: They won’t take down material (or, in Google’s case, remove it from Google indexes) just because someone says it’s defamatory. … But if they see a court order that declares that some material is defamatory, they tend to take down or deindex the material, relying on the court’s decision.”
They included the example of a gentleman who posted a negative review of a Georgia dentist on Yelp. After a lawsuit was filed against a nonexistent man with the same name, spelled slightly different, and an agreement was reached for an injunction on negative reviews by the imaginary defendent, Yelp was notified and the review was removed from its website.
“(T)he trouble is that these internet platforms can't really know if the injunction was issued against the actual author of the supposed defamation — or against a real person at all,” the pair wrote.
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