Sorry, But We Just Can’t Pull Down That Post

At Ghafla! we have been doing news for only slightly over 3 months now, and in that time, our traffic has seen tremendous growth. People seem to really like our news. We have many people in our entertainment ecosystem who depend on us to fulfil their needs. We have the artists, the readers, the advertisers and so on. Pleasing all of these people has been an issue where a delicate balance has had to be achieved. To do this, we had to form some policies in the company.

There especially is a conflict of interest between our readers and the artists, where the readers love to read sensational stories about the artists, but the artists hate seeing negative stuff posted about them. What have we done about this situation? We mostly post positive news about artists, but  when there is evidence beyond reasonable doubt of some sort of scandal, we have no choice but to post it. For example, we get numerous e-mails from ‘unknown sources’ that contain very slanderous content. These e-mails normally are full of baseless mudslinging, and we never post based on this ‘evidence.’ But if a celeb posts something scandalous on their own social media profile(which many people are prone to doing from time to time), or comes out with a diss track about a fellow rapper, our hands are tied on that. We have to report the facts.

The standard response from the celeb community so far has been that the offended party always comes forward asking us to take down the post. This is a rather extreme, and very impractical approach to solving tough issues. I can say here and now that we will probably not take down a post that has substantial evidence to it. You are better off releasing a quick rebuttal statement to prove or disprove what has been said about you. This will cool off any heat you are feeling at the moment. But take down a factual post? Not happening.