How do you define "fake review"? People are not happy with a company and its app and they are "punishing" the company, what is the purpose of reviews if not this?

Exactly, how do you define "fake review"? Google sees 100K+ negative reviews coming in for one app on one day. What do you think they're going to do? Take 'em all down and call it a day. I really doubt that there is some incredibly corrupt culture in Google Play reviews or something like some are suggesting. I really the product owners just want to go home for the day/turn off the computer and eat dinner, just like everybody else that has a job.

How is that not fraud though? They are advertising a manipulated review score. The 1 stars aren't bots, they are people. Would it be legal for e.g. yelp to remove a string of bad reviews stemming from a catering company giving a wedding food poisoning?

I'm not saying I condone what happened. I just see people claiming corruption, and I personally doubt that. I think its more along the form of "lets remove these reviews for now and analyze them tomorrow"

Corruption is a tricky subject. Pawns of a dictatorship, a mafia or any hierarchical corrupt structure... They might not be aware of what's actually going on but that doesn't change the fact that the structure is corrupt. Whatever caused this, Google's guidelines, its business practices, its investor relations, is corrupt.

So, if prosecution or police receives too many (above average) complaints about something on a single day, they should just trash all of them and go home, is that what you are saying?

No. I never said that Google taking the reviews down is warranted or they are in the right or something. I'm just saying I don't think it's a malicious attack on users. And app store reviews of a stock trading app and the consensus of the general public on their police are completely different social scenarios, so comparing them is aimless.

No, those entities are subject to laws. Google and friends have transcended the mundane world of us mere mortals.

If you're using an AI, I assume they see that the comments coming in all follow an extremely similar format or come from suspicious IP addresses or come in at suspicious time intervals and so on. There are plenty of indicators that a review might be a bot.

That would be wrong but believable. I read some of the reviews, they did look very similar in ways beyond describing the same problems.

But I'm good with assuming malice, it seems like every company that takes action right now is unlikely to be doing it coincidentally. Maybe Google is doing it because of money somehow, hopefully it's an actual mistake that they'll fix. I suspect the former.

A fake review would be a review left by someone who is not a real user or customer. Thats almost impossible for google to work out but they would make it an aim to get as close as possible.

You want to try to avoid the mob jumping in on the reviews of something they never used because of some bad news.

Let X be the number of angry people who were affected by Robinhood's decision and let Y be the number of negative reviews left today, do you really think Y is greater than X here? If an app does a bad thing, it gets negative reviews. If an app does a really really bad thing, it gets a lot of negative reviews. What's so weird about that? Where is the "mob"?

But it's a free market and Google can do whatever they want lol. Don't you dare to say a bad word about them.