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Social media rumors lead to PepsiCo lawsuit

...so take down those 3,412 Facebook links, 20,244 Facebook posts, 242 YouTube videos, 6 Instagram links, and 562 tweets ... by court order.
Written by
July 30, 2018
Naked Security burning corn puffs Facebook Fake News Hoax India Instagram internet hoax internet rumours Kurkure PepsiCo PepsiCo India Twitter youtube

Kurkure is PepsiCo’s finger-licking, lip-smacking, Indian corn puff snack. PepsiCo is happy to tell anybody who’ll listen that it makes Kurkure in state-of-the-art, automated, hygienic, food-safety-award-winning, certified factories. Here’s a 5-minute video of the process on YouTube. As you can see, we’re talking rice meal, edible vegetable oil (palm oil), corn meal, gram meal, spices, sugar and whatnot.
“Whatnot” is not code for “plastic.” There is no plastic in Kurkure. But somehow, the plastic jokes keep coming.
https://twitter.com/abhishtic/status/1022439710541545473



And because PepsiCo is so not laughing, and because the grain-based, beverage-centric multinational company is laughing so very not hard and has so very many lawyers, it’s sued to get all those despicable jokes and plastic rumors taken offline.
As Media Nama reported on Thursday, PepsiCo has obtained an interim order from the Delhi High Court to delete hundreds of posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
PepsiCo said in its petition in a civil defamation suit that the plastic rumors have been swirling for years on those social media platforms, and it demanded that they be taken down. That translates into takedowns of 3,412 Facebook links, 20,244 Facebook posts, 242 YouTube videos, 6 Instagram links, and 562 tweets, be they rumor-spreading, notes about NOT spreading the rumor, or jokes like those above.
Or there are all those people who set Kurkure on fire, to prove either that 1) it’s made out of plastic, or 2) it’s not made out of plastic, or 3) it’s not made out of plastic but it smells like burning plastic when you set it on fire.
You can still see those videos on YouTube, unless you live in India, where the posts have been blocked.

This didn’t start with Kurkure, mind you. It started with another crunchy PepsiCo gift to the world: the Lays potato chip. As first reported by LiveMint, PepsiCo India managed to get the High Court to tell Facebook and YouTube to block video clips that claimed that the chips were made with plastic.
…which, like the Kurkure rumor it spawned, is pure rubbish, PepsiCo said. Or, in legalese, these rumors are “baseless and reckless, and without any regard for truth or due care for verification.” In February, Justice Jayant Nath handed down an interim order that Facebook and YouTube block the problematic URLs until the next hearing.
PepsiCo had this to say in a statement sent to MediaNama:

Kurkure is a 100% safe, vegetarian snack made from trusted, high quality everyday kitchen ingredients like rice, dal, corn, gram and roasted spices.
It’s an extremely loved brand and consumed by families across India. However, rumors suggesting that Kurkure has plastic in it have plagued the brand. It’s for this reason we’ve called out the ingredients of Kurkure proactively in all our communication and have been transparent about its manufacturing by taking consumers to our plants to see the process themselves. We constantly urge consumers to not fall prey to baseless rumors and to enjoy their pack of Kurkure.

PepsiCo is entirely right: none of us should fall prey to whacky rumors we see disseminated online. The only problem is that its ban includes what are clearly jokes.
You can’t legislate the silliness out of the internet. If you try, you’ll get a whole load of publicity, but it sure won’t be the lip-smacking kind. It will be the kind that sets itself aflame all by itself and spreads like wildfire, leaving a very bad taste in your corporate mouth.


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13 Comments

Thanks to the Streisand effect I’ve learned:
1) What Kurkure is.
2) That the latest meme is that Kurkure is made from plastic.
The Internet is a wonderful place. :)

3) A lot of people don’t know how much of their food is flammable.

(4) this sentence would make Dave Barry proud and had me chortling:
Or there are all those people who set Kurkure on fire, to prove either that 1) it’s made out of plastic, or 2) it’s not made out of plastic, or 3) it’s not made out of plastic but it smells like burning plastic when you set it on fire.

> “The only problem is that its ban includes what are clearly jokes.”
I don’t see the humor in this. It falls into the same class as the tasteless burger chain videos of spitting into the burgers in the kitchen.
How about a poll to see how many readers think it’s not funny?

it really doesn’t matter if you see humor in it or not, the point is that you can censor everyone on the internet.
I don’t know where you live Laurence (or care) but in America we all have the freedom to express our self however we want. There is no limiting factor on if what i say is actually funny or not ;P

But the First Amendment doesn’t mean you can say whatever you want, wherever you want, however you want – not without possibly serious repercussions, anyway.
The traditional example is that the Bill of Rights doesn’t protect your freedom to “shout ‘Fire’ in a crowded theatre” – just as it isn’t there to ‘protect’ you if you spread lies about people, make racist comments to them, discriminate against them, write unfair contracts to tie them up. and so on.

It’s not a question of whether it’s funny or not. It’s a question of whether a given country’s libel law holds that satire is defamatory. “With cases involving outrageous parody and satire, the path of least resistance has been to find the ‘speech’ non-defamatory as a matter of law. The rationale used to justify this conclusion is that no reasonable reader could understand the publication as an assertion of fact. The presumption is that satires so outrageous as to preclude belief is incapable of harming reputation” – From Constitutional Law-Satire, Defamation, and the Believability Rule as a Bar To Recovery – Falwell v. Flynt by Kevin M. Smith

Kevin Smith writes copyright law now? No wonder Clerks2 lacked the charm of his earlier stuff.

Yeah, tell the internet to stop making jokes about your product, what a great idea…

Well whatever you do don’t even think about pepsi and human stem cells, let alone enter it in a search.

I don’t get it. Any 15yr old can plaster the internet pepsi plastic whatever pics and posts in places pepsi cant reach, and never take down. Seems like a fun task to me, but i don’t know what the hell that stuff is…

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