Google needs to crack down on “bad review” robbers killing small businesses

COVID 19 has created an extreme economy. Google became 166 percent richer during the pandemic process, but many small businesses were financially hit and barely stuck to their lives.

One bad Google review can break small businesses. The current digital extortion trend of fraudsters posting bad reviews and demanding payment for deletion poses a serious risk to many companies that rely on customer trust.

This is a painfully obvious technical solution problem. Only allow reviews to be posted if you clearly use the service.

Negative reviews from truly unhappy customers are a legitimate part of doing business. They are in the best interests of the consumer and, in fact, freedom of speech. However, in many cases, bad reviews do not reflect real market interactions. They are posted by malicious competitors, dissatisfied ex-employees or partners, or other malicious third parties who seek accurate revenge or resolve personal grudges against the employer.

Next, behind the loopholes in this technology is a band of “bad review” robbers who have created a new industry. These operational criminals post fake reviews and suggest removing them in exchange for cash from a desperate business. You may post as multiple people or post multiple reviews. Leave a 1 star review without text. Or post a blatantly false statement explaining an interaction that never really happened.

Fake reviews can negatively impact your business in one or more ways. Loss of client or customer. Poor reputation; loss of advertising revenue and sponsorship. Decreased employee morale and retention rate. Decreased ability to attract quality employees and talent. Decreased profits, even closures in extreme cases.

Hackstars who prey on small businesses are keenly aware that reviews are a global product that almost everyone sees reviews before using the business. About 90% of consumers around the world prefer to read reviews before buying a product, and 79% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

In this trust economy, Google reviews are the king. This is the most used review platform and is used by 59% of consumers to read reviews. As the saying goes, great power comes with great responsibility — and Google has great power over the fate of small businesses. Therefore, we must take significant responsibility for this force by strengthening our efforts to stop fake reviews.

In Google’s own ads, they claim to support small businesses. But they clearly allow fraudsters to circumvent their rules and blackmail small businesses with impunity. Their system is set up to make it easier for people to complain about their business, but it’s much harder for business owners to deal with false or misleading reviews. The increase in these companies is suing defamation proceedings against reviewers or Google itself.

As tech giants become more and more involved in legal action, there should be a dispute between the business itself and the person who left the suspected defamation review, arbitration of what Google is or not. He argued that he should not be expected to be a person. , Slutty. The company said, “To legislate removal in the absence of judicial review, Google LLC will act as a court, whether certain content is deficient, and whether effective defenses (such as truth) will be applied. We need to reach a verdict about what to do. Google LLC is not in a good position to do this. ”

I agree with Google. It is completely inappropriate and, in fact, very disturbing to be empowered to rule on issues such as freedom of speech for defamation, consumer rights and business rights. I’m not claiming that Google needs to turn into court.

Rather, Google needs to fix this loophole with a technical solution. But the obvious reason they don’t do that is that it can harm their bread and butter metrics. engagement. After all, Google’s reason for existence is to find a technical solution to the problem. This should be easy to fix. It’s not that Google can’t stop it, it’s that they don’t want to stop it.

After all, the pandemic has made the tech giant incomprehensible. Alphabet, the parent company of Apple, Microsoft and Google, is worth $ 6.4 trillion in total, more than double the total value when the COVID-19 pandemic began. In stark contrast, there is an ongoing struggle for small businesses everywhere. In the United States, the Federal Reserve reported that about 120,000 additional small businesses were closed in the first year of the pandemic, and more than 17,500 chain stores disappeared from Highstreet, Shopping Centers and retail parks across the UK. I did.

We hope that Google will prioritize ethical decisions over commercial decisions. Otherwise, small businesses will continue to be the victims of malicious reviews and scammers. This is the same small business that Google claims to advocate. Google needs to take that responsibility seriously. If not, they will continue to provide a source of income for criminals, scammers, and robbers. It hardly matches their good fighting cry “do no evil”.