In a recent Brandchanel piece, Abram Sauer posits there are four states of mind for viewing Gawker blogs, different states positions ways to view Gawker blogs, “uncaring unfamiliarity,” fanboysim, playa haterism, and fear. Sauer writes “Consumerist.com has the most fear-provoking potential. This is because Consumerist.com is a brand killer. “

Aw, shucks, you’re making us blush in our pants.

He also points out that we posted a story about Dell putting keyloggers in its laptops, which turned out to be false. Even though our lede reads, “We won’t pretend to be technosavvy enough to know if this is a valid interpretation of looking at a Dell laptop’s still steaming bowels,” Sauer found our note admitting our misstep was “very minor.” As in, we failed to a prominent enough of a correction.

Ok. Deep breath here.

THERE ARE NO KEYLOGGERS IN DELL LAPTOPS.

THIS WEBSITE IS A HOAX.

Frome Snopes: “the specific tale presented above is nothing more than an example of “government conspiracy” type hoaxlore. It originally appeared on http://www.chromance.de, a site which carried several other obvious hoaxes…The graphics for the article were lifted from another site’s page about commercial keyboard loggers, and the purported letter from the Department of Homeland Security appears to be an altered version of someone else’s example of correspondence from the DHS. “

Dell obviously has much more important things to worry about than our posting of year-old misinformation. Things like exploding laptops atop ammo boxes.

Color me redacted.

Brand killer, while sexy, is also wrong. Our goal is to get companies to act better, not to destroy capitalism. Capitalism is awesome and it puts foods in our bellies. But if your brand is built on offering crappy products and bilking consumers and then ignoring them when they complain, maybe your brand should die.

If you’re full of hidden fees, if you’re going to offer bad service but advertise how great it is, if you’re going teach your employees to screw customers over and then deny culpability when you’re exposed and blame it all on one employee, brand death is deserved.

Fine. We’ll wear the suit, with an ease put in: bad. The brands we want to kill are the bad ones.

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