The reason I suspect it's something automatic (at least in my case), and not something targeted by the business I was reviewing, is that I removed half of the review and it did start showing after around 10 minutes of waiting. I edited the removed half back in and it vanished again. I was eventually able to narrow it down to a couple of paragraphs. One of them contained swearing ("fucking" and "assholes", which the management of the business were), which I guess makes sense. The other was very innocuous so I have no idea why Google disliked it. Anyway, by that time I'd gotten bored of having to wait ~10 mins after every step of this bizarro dystopian binary search so I left it at that.

At this point it's received a handful of likes, and I received an email notification that a hundred people have seen it (and that I should register as a "local reviewer", yeah right). So I guess it's going to stay up for good now and don't need to check it daily out of paranoia any more.

And yes, this was the first and only review I've ever written on Google, in case that's part of the equation.

My biggest takeaways from this were that a) holy shit Google employees are a bunch of assholes and can go fuck themselves for writing code that shadow-filters a review instead of giving any indication that it violates their puritanical Christian policies, and b) Google is apparently not smart enough to fool me when I searched for the review from an incognito tab in a different browser but the same client IP, which almost seems like a mistake. Like, if you're going to make the effort to shadow-ban people, why not be thorough about it?

There is. The difference is that in the first case, the ranter will tweak their language and continue ranting about the fvcking a55h0les, while in the second case, they will go away quietly. The second outcome is _clearly_ the best for all concerned.

You think I can't write a review without profanity? Of course I can. I can be extremely polite while pointing out the issues I had with the business. That's exactly what I did when I realized this was happening. I just didn't know I was going to be held to that standard when I posted the review, and the system lied to me that what I wrote was acceptable so I had no reason to believe otherwise.

If you were relying on not reading reviews like mine because my use of profanity implied I was a jerk, well I'm sorry but your heuristic isn't going to work any more because I know now. It wasn't even hard for me to figure out, so I'm sure most of the jerks have figured it out too. So sorry if you were relying on that, but you probably can't any more.

The heuristic reasoning being: a review is of low value if it's written by someone who's default attitude is vulgar, regardless if that person is willing to correct self when requested.

The discriminator being: If a review has profanity initially, don't display it even if the review is improved. Also don't display other reviews by that person.

Not something I agree with, but it seems that's what user esperent meant.

> If you were relying on not reading reviews like mine because my use of profanity implied I was a jerk, well I'm sorry but your heuristic isn't going to work any more because I know now. It wasn't even hard for me to figure out, so I'm sure most of the jerks have figured it out too. So sorry if you were relying on that, but you probably can't any more.

And that's the idea behind shadow banning - the banned person is supposed to never become aware of the ban.

Of course, delaying the complaint and doing full shadow banning are still different things, and the former would suffice, but they chose the easy way out I guess, because their main objective is to keep the bad guys out.

Honestly I can’t believe I’m defending Google, but it’s possible that they’ve determined certain language makes the review less useful. Evidence of that might be the other portion of the review which seemed to trigger the shadow ban without any profanity.

Maybe the corporate culture embeds it, or the behavior is used as a performance indicator.

Beware of Google employees' agenda on language [1]. Something like "the restaurant service was insanely fast" can trigger a shadow banning.

[1] https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation

>Their "Courtesy Patrol" service is useless. I tried this service every night for a week but it made no difference; the noise still continued on that night and the following nights. Also, the people at the service told me that it takes them an hour to send someone over after you call them. So if you ever have a reason to call this service, you better be prepared that your problem won't get solved for at least an hour after you call.

Google has a style guide for documentation that suggests that people do not include certain kinds of words. This does not imply that users posting content with these words will trigger policy violations.

Keep your prejudices to yourself.

The higher tiers are more public, like for the 'local guides' for instance: https://maps.google.com/localguides/

On a related note, I’ve been getting overwhelmed with “How’d we do?” after the fact online surveys lately - doctor visits, rental car, retail shopping - and I can’t help but wonder if along with actually trying to improve their services, these surveys act to manage the narrative. That if I can complain to them, I won’t complain to Google, yelp or TripAdvisor.

Absolutely, that's precisely what they are for.

One of the best is a person who wrote: "Shitty service, never been there" and it their only review.

A couple months later I was notified that "x users found this review helpful". So someone must have seen it despite me never reviewing anything else.

I hear ads for them on the radio all the time.

Broadcast radio, so I know the ads aren't targeted at me.