A few days ago, it was reported that restaurants in cities such as New York, San Francisco and Chicago encountered "professional bad reviewers" on Google Maps. In fact, to put it simply, someone uses the "one-star bad review" to "intimidate and blackmail" the business. According to a report in The New York Times, almost every email to these restaurants was the same. It reads, "We sincerely apologize for our actions and do not want to harm your business, but we have no choice." The sender said he lived in India and asked the restaurants to "remove bad reviews" in exchange for a $75 Google Play Store gift card that could be resold to provide them with several weeks of revenue. In response,

Google Maps said it is "investigating the situation and has begun to delete comments that violate its policies." At the same time, Google also emphasized that "reviews must be based on real experience, and when we find behavior that violates the policy, we will take prompt action, including deleting content, suspending accounts, and even suing." Despite this, there b2b data are still quite a few restaurants with negative reviews that continue to emerge and are retained. "We just felt defenseless," said Julianna Yang, general manager of Sons & Daughters in San Francisco. In fact, the problem of "bad reviews" on Google Maps has been around for a long time. It is reported that operators including wineries, art studios, dental clinics and other operators have also encountered similar

"false reviews" and "malicious negative reviews", which have damaged the company's reputation, including malicious competition methods from rivals. But in the United States, lawmakers tend to be more on the side of consumers, protecting users' "right to complain" online, and operators will only learn the identity of anonymous commenters if the court determines they are fake. Obviously, such a system also makes consumers' "bad evaluation rights" really not friendly enough for businesses. 1. "Protected Right to Bad Evaluation" and "Unarmed Merchants" There is no doubt that the problem of "bad review extortion" is not only on platforms like Google Maps these days, but also on e-commerce platforms or food delivery platforms.