DiscoverVancouver.com claims a small Courtney, B.C. children’s charity is driving away its ad business and is threatening to sue the charity.
The brewing legal battle began when Steven Baird, managing director of Street Smart Kidz—which works with the RCMP to keep kids safe by providing information about everything from safety rules for grade-schoolers to ways to prevent child abuse—rejected a painting submitted to an online art show organized for the charity because he deemed it too violent.
On April 14, the artist added a post to the DiscoverVancouver.com forum calling Street Smart Kidz a “rip-off charity.”
Baird said he was surprised to find his charity’s website was on a forum that included threads on, he said, child sex tourism and how to rape a woman. Kids were searching for “Streetsmartkidz” on Google and ending up in the DiscoverVancouver forum, said Baird.
When his repeated attempts to get the charity’s URL removed from the forum failed, he called advertisers whose ads appeared on the site including LA Weight Loss, Harrison Hot Springs, and Pots and Pancakes. “I contacted the seven advertisers that were on our page, just to ask them, ‘Do you know that you are advertising on a pornographic website,?’ ” he said. “I never said ‘You should not advertise with them.’ I said ‘Did you know you are advertising on there?’ That is all I said.”
The dispute went public this week after Nova Scotia’s tourism department pulled its ads from DiscoverVancouver.com after discovering a Google ad buy put its ads on the website’s forum. The website itself includes information on events, concerts and festivals around the city. However, alongside relatively benign posts on the current events, movies and the upcoming Euro 2008 soccer championships, the forum includes pictures of nearly naked women in pantyhose sitting on men’s faces and discussions about deriving pleasure from seeing beautiful women cry.
Tourism department spokeswoman Tina Thibeau said the department “had no idea” the ads were appearing alongside any offensive content. She explained that the ads were part of a recent online advertising deal with web giant Google. The province bought $60,000 worth of online advertising as part of an extensive promotional campaign, but there was no way to monitor where the ads ended up.
Baird said GM and Telus have also recently had ads on the site and as of Friday morning visitors to the site from Toronto saw ads for Unilever’s Dove, Amazon and Lavalife.
Soon after contacting the advertisers, Baird received a letter on May 2 from Gowlings, the law firm representing DiscoverVancouver, accusing him of defamation arising from “false statements about our client’s business tending to lower the reputation of our client including an allegation that its website is pornographic.”
The letter stated DiscoverVancouver would remove the Street Smart Kidz thread from the forum as “a courtesy” if Baird provided a list of all the advertisers he contacted and wrote a retraction that said his statements to the advertisers “were unfounded and untrue and nothing but lies.”
The letter also stated Baird had five days to respond before lawyers would “seek instructions to commence legal proceedings.”
“As you can appreciate, if a defamatory statement results in any loss of advertising revenue to our client, our client’s claim for damages against you and Street Smart Kids will be significant,” stated the letter.
Baird initially hired a lawyer, but after three weeks the legal fees approached $1,500. (The charity’s total annual budget is $7,000.) Baird dismissed the lawyer and wrote his own response, which he sent to Joanne Kuroyama at law firm Gowlings on Thursday. “We have documented over 100 pages of material [to show] that the website Discover Vancouver Forum has not followed its own moderator’s rules,” he stated. “We have over 100 forum pages that discuss ‘pornography’ quite openly.”
Lisa Fetty, vice-president of Discover Vancouver, disputes Baird’s allegations, saying the website is “family oriented and not at all pornographic in nature.”
“There is a lot of juvenile conversation on the forum itself,” she says. “Because it is an open forum, there is freedom of speech for people to come and talk about topics and such, but we do moderate it very strongly and certainly do not allow anything pornographic or anything geared to harming children or women on our site. In fact, we report those types of posts if they ever do end up on the site to the local authority.”
Discover Vancouver employs eight full-time moderators, she added.
Fetty said she is not concerned that advertisers besides Nova Scotia’s Department of Tourism will pull their ads, though she intends to follow up with Google. “I am going to be contacting [Google] personally to discuss the situation and let them know that there has never been a need to be concerned about it being pornographic,” she said.
