Judge rules against French blogger who gave restaurant a bad review

Caroline Doudet was ordered by the court to amend her review and to pay damages.

17:21 17 July 2014

On August, French blogger Caroline Doudet, who has more than 3,000 followers and whose blog ranks highly on search engines, went to a restaurant called Il Giardino and gave it a bad review afterwards. Writing a blog post entitled "the place to avoid in Cap-Ferret: Il Giardino", she told her followers that the service was not so good. Due to her high rankings on Google and subsequent influence over potential customers searching for the restaurant online, the owner of the restaurant said that the review unfairly hurt their business and filed a case on court.

The judge ruled against the blogger and asked Ms Doudet to amend the title of her blog post and to pay €1,500 in damages. Based on the court documents, the review appeared fourth in the results of a Google search for the restaurant and the title needs to be changed so that the phrase “the place to avoid” was less prominent in the results.

Ms Doudet reacted to the ruling saying: "This decision creates a new crime of 'being too highly ranked [on a search engine]', or of having too great an influence.”

"What is perverse, is that we look for bloggers who are influential, but only if they are nice about people," she added.

Meanwhile, the restaurateur said: "Maybe there were some errors in the service, that happens sometimes in the middle of August - I recognise that.

"But this article showed in the Google search results and did my business more and more harm, even though we have worked seven days a week for 15 years. I could not accept that.

"People can criticise, but there is a way of doing it - with respect. That was not the case here."