It doesn't matter if some people think good pizza should be burnt to some degree. There is no such thing as objectively good pizza, so one-star review "The pizza was burnt, I didn't like it." is entirely valid thing to say.

I disagree.

Bro is in this thread defending Google like he owns stocks. Oh wait...

Well I do own Google stocks, since their IPO, but I'm not defending Google here but German culture against low-bro 400pounds American nerds.

The entire concept of a review is that it's one person's opinion.

In Germany, we care more about facts and I'd rather have it stay that way. Americans lost their right to talk ANYTHING German a decade ago.

Something like this happened to me too, for what it's worth. I wrote a completely factual description of my bad experience with a shop, and then got a nasty notice from Google that my review was being taken down because of a defamation claim.

I looked up how this works, and I found ads for law firms that specialize in removing bad reviews. They charge a set price for each review they remove. As a regular consumer, you just have to accept that your honest reviews will be removed, unless you're willing to risk going to court, where you'll have to prove that your subjective experience was accurate.

Creating an unflattering online review has such a low bar for confirming identity. It would not be a surprise for a law firm advertising the review takedown service were hiring bot farms to leave reviews at scale, create their own market.

Those law firms also have to operate within the law, doh. So if you think your review needs to stand, you should hire a law firm yourself and fight for your cause.

Nice, so every time I visit a restaurant and want to leave a review, I'll have to lawyer up. Sounds eminently reasonable.