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It seems to me that the bad reviews were published on the site regardless of their offer. So I can't see how is this extortion.

Extortion would be along the lines of "we publish some made up bad reviews unless you pay".



> extort - (transitive) To take or seize off an unwilling person by physical force, menace, duress, torture, or any undue or illegal exercise of power or ingenuity.

This is taking money from an unwilling person by duress, using an undue exercise of power (ie control of bad reviews on their platform).

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/extort


Duress? LOL. What duress? If they pay, the situation gets better. If they don't pay the situation remains the same. Your claim is ridiculous. In any case the situation never gets worse so there is no duress.


Extortion is a weird crime if you think about it.

You ask people for money to not do something that's in itself legal.

It's a topic ripe for tortured moral philosophy :)


People here for some reason think that throwing around legal terms based on gut feelings is somehow the start of civil discussion. And I tend to correct those people. That's all. Extortion is a legal term and it's pretty well defined compared to other crimes. And this is not extortion. I can recommend all commenters who downvoted to go and denounce the offence of extortion and see for themselves what happens. I for one would love to see it to have a good laugh :D


> Extortion is a legal term

It also has a definition that 99% of the people you are communicating with, who are not lawyers, are more familiar with:

the practice of obtaining something, especially money, through force or threats.

You're sperging out about the wrong thing to the wrong people.


[flagged]


> NO THREAT WHATSOEVER IN THAT OFFER

That's obviously untrue, so I'm not sure why you'd write it, but well done with the capitalization. "Pay me or I will continue to publish this blurb which is damaging to you" is as clear a threat as can be.


That's not a threat. You basically say that every negative comment written by people who has no connection whatsoever with Glassdoir is a purposeful threat by Glassdoor. How does that make any sense to you?


> offered to remove bad reviews if we paid them


Yes. You are right. That is not extortion.


In my opinion, the important takeaway is that their actions completely undermine the integrity of the service they are claiming to provide.

Whatever you'd like to call it, it's scummy behavior and they deserve to lose any market share they've gained by misleading users about their service.


Calling something extortion which is a legal term and punishable by federal law is different from accusing them undermining integrity of the service. And yeah, it's scummy.


It's still extortion.


Nope




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