ATOS vs CarerWatch - It Just Gets Worse!

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CarerWatch members visiting the New Republic are invited to respond below in the comments.

Doughty British Grannies Prepare to

Slamdunk Cheese-eating ATOS Surrender Monkeys

It is looking increasingly like it is ATOS Healthcare that is going to find itself the victim of legal action as the true nature of their “case” against CarerWatch becomes clearer.

And ATOS says “Fuck You!”

ATOS are claiming the reason they nuked the CarerWatch forum was because of A SINGLE LINK in a post over FIVE MONTHS OLD. The target of that offending link is STILL ON TEH INTAWEBZ - and with no sign of ATOS having attempted to take it down. The offending link is back there <---- which leads here

OK, *speechless* Try to finish this later. In the meantime please read the update from CarerWatche's blog.

Michael Chewter from CarerWatch said

ATOS are a very dishonest organisation. They should have informed Carer Watch if they were genuinely concerned about any of the posts on its site... They have done the same thing with other carer and disability sites.

Even Dr Goldacre is getting in on the act

When you consider the way ATOS treat claimants it is hardly surprising that complaints are made about their behaviour.

As a member of the LRC and the Labour Party and a founder member of Carer Watch, I would like to ask MPs to take this matter up with the government, who employ ATOS.

CarerWatch received this reply from Atos, to their earlier letter:

Dear Frances,

Thank you for your email. The posting which we consider to be defamatory against Atos Healthcare and our employees is dated March 23rd, 8:51 pm.

As I said in my previous email, we fully support the right of people to express their opinions and would very much like to work with you to ensure your forum is reinstated as soon as possible...

CarerWatch replied:

Dear Caroline

Thank you for supplying the date and time of the post that concerns you.

We have finally traced it. We run a live discussion group and posts are normally only current for a few days. In this case the post is five months old. It did not create any interest at the time and has long since become inactive.

Having seen the post we are even more confused as to why you took this aggressive action against us. We were surprised to see that this post was not written by a member of CarerWatch but is merely a link to an article on another site.

We were also surprised when we followed the link to see that the original article is still visible on the site of origin.

We cannot understand why you would take this matter up with us when your dispute is with the authors of the linked article. We feel like collateral damage in this.

We would like to point out that we are running a private discussion group for members and we do not know how you saw this link on our site. But if you have some how been watching the posts in our group you will know that members post on an enormous breadth of topics and post links to a wide variety of other sites.



Members often post links to material on other sites precisely because they are vehemently opposed to the material.

We repeat – this is a discussion group and posts have to be read in the context of open discussion.

We are concerned that this type of extreme hyper vigilance of discussion groups could seriously damage free and open discussion.

You say that you embarked on this action to protect the reputation of your company. But you can call on unlimited resources to obtain legal advice and you should bear in mind that groups like us have no resources and cannot obtain legal advice. We think you should bear this in mind when making your actions proportionate and appropriate.

We are sure you, like us, wish to bring this situation to a speedy conclusion. As it was your action that resulted in our forum being taken down, we suggest the following. We will remove the post in question (without prejudice), and in turn you will make arrangements to have our forum reinstated, whilst also giving us a guarantee that should you have any concerns in future, you will bring them directly to us and not to the hosting company.

Considering the immense distress caused to our members, and the volume of unnecessary work created for us, we consider these to be extremely reasonable requests.

We await your reply.

Frances