GameStopGate: Google DELETES 100,000 One-Star Reviews of Robinhood App

Google has come to Robinhood’s aid after hundreds of thousands flocked to the Google Play Store to leave one-star reviews of the stock trading app. The Big Tech giant has deleted at least 100,000 of these reviews.

According to a 2018 blog post, “ratings and reviews meant to manipulate an app’s average rating or top reviews” violate Google’s policies. It also mentions that they launched a system which “combines human intelligence with machine learning to detect and enforce policy violations in ratings and reviews.”

“A team of engineers and analysts closely monitor and study suspicious activities in Play’s ratings and reviews, and improve the model’s precision and recall on a regular basis,” the post reads.

The inundation of one-star reviews caused Robinhood’s average rating to go from nearly five stars to one star. But now with at least 100,000 of those reviews deleted, its average rating has jumped back up to a four-star average.

On Thursday Robinhood decided to halt trading on stocks like GameStop, AMC, and Nokia. Not only was their app flooded with negative reviews in response, they’re also facing at least two lawsuits, one of which is a class action suit filed in the state of New York. The suits accuse Robinhood of depriving consumers and manipulating the market.

Robinhood was far from the only trading platform to temporarily freeze investment in GameStop, AMC, and others. These stocks have been at the center of a massive run-up over the past few days. Investors at Reddit’s WallStreetBets community noticed that certain hedge funds were shorting GameStop—that is, betting on their stock value to continue decreasing—so they rallied users to buy a bunch of GameStop stock and significantly drive up its value. Hedge funds doubled down and accelerated their shorting of GameStop, but by then the news of GameStop’s rally had spread like wildfire and untold numbers of people began buying its stock as well. The rally is said to have collectively cost hedge funds and other professional investors billions of dollars.

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