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Cease and Desist letter
April 19, 2011
Mr. Anas Qtiesh
Mr. Editor of Global Voices
Mr. Advocacy Director
Re: False claims about EGHNA in your article on Global Voices
Dear Mr. Qtiesh and Global Voices Team:
EGHNA is an IT company established in 2009, and based in Bahrain. It provides cost-effective solutions like CRM, HRM, and CMS to help customers reduce their costs and increase their revenue.
We are writing to you to request that you promptly cease and desist from conduct which constitutes serious defamation of EGHNA and cause harm to its business and reputation.
A. Background
You published on your blog, and on Global Voices Advocacy site an analysis that promoted false accusations about our company on the following link:
http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/2011/04/18/spam-bots-flooding-twitter-to-drown-info-about-syria-protests/
We consider this article as defamation to our reputation. Our business can be strongly injured by the inaccurate and false accusations within the offensive article published, quoted, and distributed on the internet. We demand that you make corrections using the all communication methods used to disseminate the false information. In view of your activities, we request, without waiving EGHNA's other rights and remedies, that you immediately publish our response in the same page of your defamatory materials, and we advise that you either correct or remove the original offending article. In particular we request that you publish the following response without any modification or delay that can result in more damage to our company and its reputation.
B. Response
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In this Article, Mr. Qtiesh tried to link EGHNA (www.eghna.com) to the Syria Government, and adopted false claims about our company and our customers by some twitter "parody" accounts. Mr. Qtiesh published his article without contacting us even trying to verify his accusations, which is an unethical journalistic behavior, and can be considered as an intentional effort to damage our company reputation.
The following points clarify the real situation regarding our company and the false accusations made in the article:
1. EGHNA is an IT company that provides technology solutions to multiple sectors, including governments. However, the Syrian government was never one of our customers, and we are not in the process of signing any business agreement with the Syrian Government. Furthermore, we don't have any relationship with any security or military organization in Syria.
2. On the contrary to what your articles tries to imply, EGHNA maintains a number of business agreements with non-government parties, and we are proud that our communication and collaboration technology is used to help the people in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine.
3. EGHNA does not review nor endorse the content of any customer as the article suggests. Your report tries to mislead your readers to think that we stand by the content of some of our customers, which is far from truth.
4. EGHNA has a strict internal policy against spammers and internet abuse, so we acted upon you report immediately. We investigated the accounts reported by your article. Here are our findings:
- @TheLovelySyria is tweeting flickr links to some Syria photos. All the links are compatible with the hash tag #Syria.
- @SyriaBeauty is tweeting flickr links to some Syria photos. All the links are compatible with the hash tag #Syria.
- Both accounts are operated by real people, their operators respond to incoming messages, and engage in active discussions, which make them real virtual citizens, not "spam bots" as your article falsely states in clear words.
- Both accounts are not sending any political information, and cannot be classified as a political campaign by any reasoning.
- Both accounts are far from reaching Twitter's flood limit, so the "flooding twitter" claim is unfounded.
- Both accounts have an active follower community, and their tweets are re-tweeted by many others.
- Both accounts are compatible with Twitter's automation policy, which says clearly "We welcome feeds that are used for community benefit or provide non-commercial information to a niche group of users, such as local weather feeds or transit information."
- Many of the accounts mentioned in your report are not linked to us, and we have no relation with them. The way the article is written however suggest linking these accounts to our company.
5. As part of our internal investigation, we have contacted our customers for their response on your claims, and they confirmed the following:
- They are not linked to any Syrian government organization in any way.
- Their only intention is to promote Syria as a place for love and beauty.
- They don't interfere with political events, and have no political agenda.
- They never attacked the Syrian revolution, nor supported the Syrian Government. They can't understand how the article links them to the Syrian Authorities.
- They never posted any feed to the Syrian revolution hash tag #Mar15 to avoid any interference with the people following the events.
- They are completely independent and their motives are well-intended.
- They refuse to take part in the bloodshed that is happening in Syria.
6. In your report, you accuse us of providing false information in our success story, and this is another totally false claim. The mentioned customer has built a community of over 250 followers, many other people re-tweeting the photos they send, and many people have contributed new photos for them. Your accusation here as well is totally false and preposterous. You based your arguments only on the site being "under-construction" and deliberately tried to hide the truth taking your reader's attention away from the facts.
We find your report completely biased and far from the truth, and we consider this report as defamation. The fact the Global voices did not approach us before publishing this report to clarify the facts shows malice or at least negligence the author, both of which are illegal and unwelcomed in a site that promotes transparency.
EGHNA remains faithful to its mission of providing cost-effective IT solutions to help customers reduce their costs and increase their revenue. EGHNA will continue to provide solutions that help the people communicate and collaborate, and is totally committed to ethical and anti-spam rules in business.
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C.
As stated above, we consider the inaccurate and biased article as defamation to a legal business entity that is punishable by the law. The fact the Global Voices and the author did not approach us before publishing this report to clarify the facts shows malice or at least negligence, both of which illegal under the law.
We request that you respond to us in writing no later than 5:00 p.m. EST on April 25, 2011.
Very truly yours,
Al-Ayham Saleh
Managing Director
www.eghna.com
email and phone removed
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