It takes about 53 seconds to damage a business with online defamation. The short film below, made in 2014, shows how; the law it illustrates has changed only in the details since, and the advice is the same: if your business has become the target of internet defamation, take legal advice as soon as possible and do not let the matter drift.
Can a company sue for defamation?
Yes, but the bar is higher than for an individual. Under section 1 of the Defamation Act 2013 a statement is defamatory only if its publication has caused, or is likely to cause, serious harm to the claimant’s reputation, and for a body that trades for profit harm is not serious unless it has caused, or is likely to cause, serious financial loss. That does not mean the business has to produce a spreadsheet of lost sales on day one, but it does mean that evidence of the effect on customers, contracts, enquiries and staff has to be gathered from the start, which is one of the reasons speed matters.
Why the clock is against you
There are four reasons a defamed business cannot afford to wait.
- The limitation period is one year, not the six years that applies to most civil claims: section 4A of the Limitation Act 1980. Under the single publication rule the year runs from the first publication of the statement, not from the last time somebody read it.
- The damage compounds. A single review or post is copied, quoted and indexed. Within weeks it can sit on the first page of a search for the company’s name, where every prospective customer, lender and recruit sees it. The longer it stays there, the more of that search history it acquires and the harder it becomes to displace.
- Evidence disappears. Posts are edited, accounts are deleted and platforms retain data for limited periods. The identity of an anonymous poster can usually be traced, but the trail goes cold; the disclosure order that forces a platform to hand over the poster’s details works best when the records still exist.
- The quickest removal routes are procedural and time-limited. Where the defamatory statement sits on a website that hosts other people’s content, a notice under section 5 of the Defamation Act 2013 starts a 48-hour process under the Operators of Websites Regulations which leaves the operator with a choice between removing the post and giving up the poster’s identity. The platforms’ own complaint routes and, since 2025, the ban on fake reviews in consumer law add to that.
What to do in the first 48 hours
Preserve the evidence before anything else: full-page screenshots with the address and the date visible, the URL, and a note of who has seen it and what they said. Do not reply in public and do not engage with the poster; a reply is a second publication and a gift to the other side. Work out who is behind the post, because the claim, and the leverage, lie against the author first: under section 10 of the 2013 Act the court will not entertain a claim against the website unless it is not reasonably practicable to sue the person who wrote the words. Then send a letter of claim that complies with the Pre-Action Protocol for Media and Communications Claims, which requires the statement, the meaning complained of, the facts said to be untrue and the serious harm to be set out. Where the posts are part of a campaign rather than a single review, the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 usually offers a quicker route to an injunction than defamation does.
The courts will very rarely stop a publication before trial in defamation, so the practical outcome in most business cases is removal by agreement, a correction, an apology and damages, secured by moving fast and building the evidence early. The review-site side of this is in Are review websites liable for defamatory reviews?, and Cohen Davis advises businesses on all of it.
First published 12 October 2014. Reviewed and updated 28 September 2026.