Earlier today, Robinhood, the most popular trading app in the US, blocked its users from buying several trending stocks, such as GameStop and AMC, which have enjoyed a massive surge over the last few days, with much of the buying being driven by online communities.
The block on buying appeared to have an instant impact on the market, with the price of these stocks quickly declining to the detriment of many of these retail traders who responded by filing class action lawsuits that accused Robinhood of depriving retail investors of potential gains and leaving hundreds of thousands of one-star app reviews.
These negative reviews pushed the overall rating for the Robinhood app in the Google Play Store down from an overall rating of 3.5 stars to 1 star.
But now, Google has stepped in and purged over 150,000 negative reviews. After Google scrubbed these dissenting reviews, Robinhood’s unfavorable 1 star rating was transformed into a positive 4 star rating.
Most of the negative reviews criticized Robinhood for blocking these stock sales and accused the company of market manipulation but now these critical voices are being erased by the tech giant Google.
Google’s purging of these reviews follows community chat app Discord temporarily silencing WallStreetBets, an online investing community that had over 250,000 members on its Discord server.
Discord initially invoked the vague, subjective censorship buzzword “hate speech” as justification for shutting down the server yesterday but then worked with the WallStreetBets to set up a new server today.
