Online libel test case
THE country’s newly minted Cybercrime Law may soon be tested. Word on the street is that a mass housing developer is contemplating filing online libel charges against those behind what it calls “vicious Internet and social media attacks” on its projects.
While the developer—Pro-Friends—has yet to file what could be an important precedent-setting case against those using Internet platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to disparage it, the firm has already set the ball in motion.
Pro-Friends, in fact, won round one of its effort to combat a “syndicated effort” to destroy its reputation when the Regional Trial Court of Mandaluyong City issued a warrant for the arrest of several persons for grave slander and oral defamation.
Interestingly, one Biz Buzz source pointed out that there’s a force associated with the family of a realtor-politician behind the concerted attacks on Pro-Friends, so business rivalry could be the root of this issue.
If this is true, to whom does the hidden hand behind the defamatory campaign against Pro-Friends belong?
In fact, what Pro-Friends calls a “demolition job” against it has been going on for sometime now. The property firm believes it isn’t a spontaneous outpouring of protest by disgruntled clients, but rather a “well-funded and orchestrated by unseen hands whowant to run the property development company to the ground so they can have a monopoly of the market.”
“The black propaganda campaign has been stretched by hiring ‘professional protesters’ to mount lightning mass actions complete with placards carrying libelous slogans against Pro-Friends,” said one source familiar with the reality firm’s side of the issue.
If rumors are to be believed, this developer politician has even used his political power to initiate inves- tigations in both houses of Congress to pressure Pro-Friends, supposedly in a bid to cripple its marketing program—all while the politician’s firm pirated key marketing people of the beleaguered real estate firm to work in his own.
Luckily for Pro-Friends, it was thrown a lifeline and a vote of confidence by GT Capital through a capital infusion of P7.24 billion, with the announced interest to acquire a controlling 51-percent stake in three years.