The UK has a pretty fierce reputation for plaintiff-friendly libel laws, and hosting companies get loads of dodgy complaints. At Bytemark we got sick of them a

The UK has a pretty fierce reputation for plaintiff-friendly libel laws, and hosting companies get loads of dodgy complaints. At Bytemark we got sick of them a few years back and spent _thousands_ taking advice from Carter-Ruck, the UK's go-to libel experts. I wrote an old rambling blog post here -> https://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2010/02/07/adventures-in-libel-or-why-i-wont-read-your-forum https://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2010/02/07/adventures-in-libel-o... but in summary, hosting companies aren't as liable for their customers' content as most solicitors would like you to believe! Since 2010 we demand very specific standards for legal complaints (more than a typical "scare letter"), or a court order - and most complainants drop away before actually doing things properly. Typical exchange might be: them: "Huge sections of this site are defamatory to my client! I demand under enormous penalty that you take the whole thing down" us: "We've not read it, do you want to tell us where the defamatory statements are?" them: "It's blazingly obvious, and we'll take you to court if you don't comply" us: "We don't know your client, or their reputation, and we don't read our customers sites, so you'll need to tell us about these defamatory statements in more detail." Very occasionally the solicitors _will_ do the work, and we're on notice at that point, but we then talk to the customer, explain the situation and ask them take down just the statements we've been notified about. The other strategy that works very often is to ask both parties if we can put them and our customer in touch, then let them sort it out. None of this is a free-speech thing, just the climate we found ourselves doing business in. We've always found it perfectly possible to respond to legal complaints across thousands of customers without pulling the plug in a panic.