Facebook and ACCC

[IanCP]

Bound to happen sooner than later

Warning to firms on Facebook comments

"LARGE companies that fail to remove false and misleading comments from their brands' Facebook pages within 24 hours face potential court action, the competition watchdog has said.

Companies are required to monitor comments left by the public to ensure they comply with advertising guidelines and consumer law, after a ruling by the advertising industry's regulator last week that everything that appears on a brand's Facebook page is advertising.

Now the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has lent its voice to the Advertising Standards Board ruling, which has thrown the marketing industry into turmoil as companies face the prospect of being penalised for what members of the public post on their sites..."

[smh.com.au ]

[engine]

This could be a nightmare to police.

It also makes me wonder if it'll drive firms away from FB and back to their own platforms.

[celgins]

Monitoring and removing that amount of content could be painful.

I suspect most companies will choose to turn off user comments (which I think you can do) rather than remove their entire Facebook presence.

[IanCP]

Infinitely cheaper to remove content and then turn off comments than having full time corporate lawyers monitoring everything.

Further, some of these corporate FB pages simply gave their consumers a free kick to complain about service or lack thereof. Some funny stories there where it blew up in their corporate faces and gave the media a field day laughing at them.

On balance, I can't see why any company would bother.

The huge list of negatives far outweighs any tiny possible PR gain.

[webindia123]

To guess that most of the negative comments are tainted and manipulated is wrong perception from regulator body. Its really difficult to scrutinize each comment especially for larger brands. Don't know where cyber policing is heading :/

- lalit kumar