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submitted 3 hours ago by hades@feddit.uk to c/germany@feddit.org

As some of you may know, Germany has one of the shittiest “defamation” code that allows any business owner to simply delete the reviews they don’t like. For a long time this had made Google Maps ranking useless: a rating of 4.9 could mean the store is really good, or it’s deleting all the bad reviews.

Not anymore.

Now if you click through all the way to the Reviews tab, Maps will tell you how many reviews the business owner has deleted in the past year.

So when choosing where to have lunch, don’t forget to check this tab. Also check the places you usually go: restaurants, stores, car mechanics. Chances are if they’re doing this you should look somewhere else.

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[-] LeFrog@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour 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.

[-] gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 1 points 1 hour ago

well, if the review says "this owner is shit because they support refugees", that in itself says something.

[-] NekoKoneko@lemmy.world 4 points 33 minutes ago

That's not really how it works with bad faith review bombing. When they're just actively trying to tank the business by any means possible, it'll be just actual lies. "Terrible haircut," "Rats everywhere," "Cut me and I was covered in blood," etc.

[-] Pechente@feddit.org 10 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

I recently had my own negative review removed from a crappy business and just checked this feature there:

Looks like it’s only semi useful as it only shows how many reviews have been removed in the last year while rating displays the total number of ratings throughout the years.

this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2026
101 points (100.0% liked)

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