In Germany there some companies who after a few months just "force provement of visit" on all low reviews. And then the person who post the review is required do fight back and upload a receipt of the store. It's verry annoying to find real good stores

I wrote this a few months ago:

On the other hand, a business owner has no other tool against review bombing except this. In a village near me a barber shop was review bombed by neo-nazis due to their support for refugees. They removed the fake reviews successfully but from time to time this Nazi scum remembers and review bomb them again. This goes on since at least 2020.

https://feddit.org/comment/12708871

OpenStreetMaps should include reviews so that I can get info from my geeks and nerd online frens

That’s all of them. People with grievances have good reviews removed too tbh

Obligatory 'Fuck Google'.

They should just straight up put a big, red exclamation mark on averages for places where unusually many reviews are removed, with an appeal process for the business, not the users.

On that lawsuit thing thought: You don't risk anything by appealing. Courts don't care what Google has to say. The business can sue you right away, they don't need to remove anything first. If what you said are simple facts however, there is nothing they can do. Nothing but ask Google to remove it anyway.

Not useless, that's a warning to avoid the business.

Google maps reviews are pretty useless in general. I find they're only to be read for entertainment value.

Not pointless, find the new average, everything removed was a 1 star

Always give a 2-star rating and explain that you would rather give it zero stars. Google won't remove it without much more investigation.