Taiwanese blogger jailed for truth-telling on restaurant cockroaches

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From the Taipei Times in Taiwan:

Thu, Jun 23, 2011

Blogger jailed over critical restaurant review

OBJECTIVITY:The judge said the blogger should not have criticized the restaurant’s food as ‘too salty’ in general, because she had eaten dried noodles and two side dishes

By Lin Liang-che / Staff Reporter

The Taichung branch of Taiwan High Court on Tuesday sentenced a blogger who wrote that a restaurant’s beef noodles were too salty to 30 days in detention and two years of probation and ordered her to pay NT$200,000 in compensation to the restaurant.

The blogger, surnamed Liu (劉), writes about a variety of topics — including food, health, interior design and lifestyle topics — and has received more than 60,000 hits on her Web site.

After visiting a Taichung beef noodle restaurant in July 2008, where she had dried noodles and side dishes, Liu wrote that the restaurant served food that was too salty, the place was unsanitary because there were cockroaches and that the owner was a “bully” because he let customers park their cars haphazardly, leading to traffic jams.

The restaurant’s owner, surnamed Yang (楊), learned about Liu’s blog post from a regular customer, and filed charges against her, accusing her of defamation.

The Taichung District Court ruled that Liu’s criticism of the restaurant exceeded reasonable bounds and sentenced her to 30 days in detention, a ruling that Liu appealed.

The High Court found that Liu’s criticism about cockroaches in the restaurant to be a narration of facts, not intentional slander.

However, the judge also ruled that Liu should not have criticized all the restaurant’s food as too salty because she only had one dish on her single visit.

Health officials who inspected the restaurant did not find conditions to be as unsanitary as Liu had described, so the High Court also ruled that Liu must pay NT$200,000 to the owner for revenues lost as a result of her blog post.

The ruling is final.

This would be ridiculous if the prison sentence would not be so infuriating.

Money talks, and it works to oppress free spech.

Don’t count on self-styled “pro-free” speech anti-Semites to come to Ms Liu’s defence. For them “free speech” means their own shoah denialism and other racism and that’s it.

Don’t count on self-styled “pro-free” speech Muslim-bashers to come to Ms Liu’s defence. For them “free speech” means their own “Eurabia” fantasies and other racism and that’s it.

Free Liu!