Is a fake review defamation of your restaurant company? In England and Wales, harm to the reputation of a body that trades for profit is not serious harm under the Defamation Act 2013 unless it has caused or is likely to cause the body serious financial loss. Under section 5 and the 2013 Regulations, the website operator has 48 hours to forward a notice of complaint to the poster, who then has five days to respond; if the poster does not respond, the operator must remove the statement within 48 hours of the end of that period. Defamation claims carry a one-year limitation period. A summary of public law, not legal advice.
What the film covers
- The bar for a company is not the bar for a person
- What this article is not about
- The route built for this: a notice that removes a statement, not the person who posted it
- Reposting does not restart the clock, and the clock is short
- Two offences people still reach for, narrowed on the same day
- Harassment needs a pattern, not one post
- The 2024 law that sounds like the answer, and is not one yet
- The Act runs out at the Welsh border
Read the full articleThe Legal Options for a Restaurant Hit by a False ReviewA false review costs bookings within days, and English defamation law sets a higher financial-loss bar for a company, a removal-only notice route, and two once-reliable offences repealed since January 2024. A one-star review goes up under the restaurant's own name on a Sunday night, and by Tuesday the booking diary for the following weekend is visibly thinner than it was the week before. The review is specific, and none of it happened: a member of staff is accused of being racist, a health inspection is invented outright, food poisoning is described as sending a table to A&E when no such table exists. It sits at the top of the search result for the restaurant's own name, above the menu and the phone number, read by everyone who searches that name before booking somewhere else instead. The owner asks around and gets five answers in one afternoon — sue them, get the platform to take it down, call the police, report it to Trading Standards, get a solicitor's letter out today — and each answer points at a different piece of law, most of them read by nobody who is giving the advice.