Companies seeking to remove negative reviews on the Internet sometimes hire reputation experts at least one of whom has recently resorted to filing libel lawsuits against phony defendants. It’s rigged to get defendant and plaintiff to agree in court that there is defamation and obtain an injunction approved by a judge. The lawyer then sends the injunction to Google and others to cleanse the negative review. (Fortune, October 25, 2016, by Jeff John Roberts)
Law professors Eugene Volokh and Paul Alan Levy ran across the scheme when they could not find a defendant’s address in any public records and noticed similar language in the the filings of two different cases. (The Washington Post, October 25, 2016, by Eugene Volokh)
Consumer Opinion, who posts reviews on websitepissedconsumer.com, is suing two California lawyers for filing bogus lawsuits to get Google and other search engines to remove negative reviews. (Ars Technica, October 25, 2016, by David Kravets)