[animal_spirits]

Exactly, how do you define "fake review"? Google sees 100K+ negative reviews coming in for one app on one day. What do you think they're going to do? Take 'em all down and call it a day. I really doubt that there is some incredibly corrupt culture in Google Play reviews or something like some are suggesting. I really the product owners just want to go home for the day/turn off the computer and eat dinner, just like everybody else that has a job.

[thereisnospork]

How is that not fraud though? They are advertising a manipulated review score. The 1 stars aren't bots, they are people. Would it be legal for e.g. yelp to remove a string of bad reviews stemming from a catering company giving a wedding food poisoning?

[animal_spirits]

I'm not saying I condone what happened. I just see people claiming corruption, and I personally doubt that. I think its more along the form of "lets remove these reviews for now and analyze them tomorrow"

[utkugenc]

Corruption is a tricky subject. Pawns of a dictatorship, a mafia or any hierarchical corrupt structure... They might not be aware of what's actually going on but that doesn't change the fact that the structure is corrupt. Whatever caused this, Google's guidelines, its business practices, its investor relations, is corrupt.

[utkugenc]

So, if prosecution or police receives too many (above average) complaints about something on a single day, they should just trash all of them and go home, is that what you are saying?

[animal_spirits]

No. I never said that Google taking the reviews down is warranted or they are in the right or something. I'm just saying I don't think it's a malicious attack on users. And app store reviews of a stock trading app and the consensus of the general public on their police are completely different social scenarios, so comparing them is aimless.

[eternalban]

No, those entities are subject to laws. Google and friends have transcended the mundane world of us mere mortals.

[neltnerb]

If you're using an AI, I assume they see that the comments coming in all follow an extremely similar format or come from suspicious IP addresses or come in at suspicious time intervals and so on. There are plenty of indicators that a review might be a bot.

That would be wrong but believable. I read some of the reviews, they did look very similar in ways beyond describing the same problems.

But I'm good with assuming malice, it seems like every company that takes action right now is unlikely to be doing it coincidentally. Maybe Google is doing it because of money somehow, hopefully it's an actual mistake that they'll fix. I suspect the former.