Google just deleted over 100k negative reviews of RobinhoodApp(twitter.com)
twitter.com
Google just deleted over 100k negative reviews of RobinhoodApp
https://twitter.com/TheQuartering/status/1354909724869853188
4 comments
There may be reasonable criteria being used such as reviews made by those who downloaded the app for the first time ever today and immediately posted a review vs a review made today by someone who first started using the app months ago and has opened it multiple times (going to guess Google has telemetry on such things). There's a lot of area between these two cases and where Google decides to draw the line is important.
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Seeing as Robinhood did do something that many of it's users may consider negative-review worthy, after all there's a huge class-action lawsuit gathering steam against it right now. It's not like these were bots that brigaded the app for no reason.
Granted, I wouldn't say what Google is doing is illegal. I think it's good to keep this in mind to reinforce the "reviews are fake" rule of thumb that one should apply to things on the appstore in general. You can be certain less obvious manipulation of these kind happen on a daily basis based on who is giving google ad money.
I'd honestly not be surprised if this action was automatic, simply because Robinhood is a very large ad words customers, and the default policy of the algorithm is to mark negative reviews as "fake" for large customers. Which makes it worst, not better, mind you.