Google Defends Robinhood App From Angry GME Mob, Censors 100,000 Negative Reviews
As the WallStreetBets fiasco heated up yesterday, Robinhood and other companies were restricting free trade of GameStop and AMC stocks under the guise of “helping users.” Since then, people have been outraged, enough so to initiate class-action lawsuits against the stock-trading app. Individual users are also now taking to leaving poor reviews on Robinhood’s app store pages due to the issues, but it appears that Google is stopping those.
9to5Google reported that since restricting the stocks targeted by WallStreetBets, the Robinhood Android app was inundated with over 100,000 negative reviews, which brought the review average to 1 star. Previously, the app sat around four stars, and it appears that it is back to that level. Since then, Google has seemingly deleted those approximately 100,000 reviews which may have just poured gasoline on the fire.
As of writing, 1-star reviews continue to pour in, expressing disdain over the events that took place yesterday. Moreover, people are trying to circumvent the review deletion by leaving 2-star reviews as well. Interestingly, it seems that the Apple App Store page for Robinhood is not being affected by the poor reviews, so perhaps they are hiding them, or they just are not flowing in like they are on Android.
In any case, we will likely see the Robinhood review rating drop soon due to incoming reviews, as Google cannot delete all bad reviews. To be clear, this is not a free speech issue, but a company protecting another company that did something that people do not agree with. However you interpret the Robinhood situation though, it is ultimately not right to put a muzzle on reviews that have legitimate concerns about a company, so we give Google 1-star for this situation.
