A man is falsely accused of being involved in various incidents. Business people turn their backs on him and his career is ruined. Now he has successfully sued Google, which refused to have the false allegations removed.
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Google and a man from Canada had a row over a series of search results for years. Because in these the man was wrongly referred to as a criminal. He sued Google because he believed the search engine would have ruined his career.
Because friends, colleagues and business partners could have found links about him with the search engine.
Man is falsely accused of not wanting to remove links from Google
What post was it? A businessman used the search engine to search his name and found a post falsely alleging child abuse. The article about him appeared in April 2006, so that’s 17 years ago now. And that caused quite a stir:
However, the founder of this website steadfastly refused to remove the post. The site’s boss said he never had posts removed and asked the man to prove his innocence by saying he was never charged with the crime.
The man asks Google for help: Unable to have the post removed this way, the businessman contacted Google to have the link to the article removed. This went on for years, because sometimes Google deleted the links, but they reappeared later.
Google argued that they cannot be held responsible for third-party content and have no obligation to remove the links. However, the Supreme Court did not follow this argument.
How did the lawsuit go? Initially, the plaintiff sought $6 million in damages. However, the court did not comply. Instead, the man was awarded $500,000 for moral violations. That’s around 450,000 euros.
Because the former businessman was personally heavily incriminated and lost a lot of money through the defamation, the court said.
In addition, Google must remove all links to the relevant post in Quebec, Canada, and not display any information about the case for 45 days.
Another company is now being sued for a lot of money:
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