Google removed at least 100,000 negative reviews of the Robinhood stock trading app from the Google Play app store after angry users sent in a flood of critical reviews that lowered the app’s rating on Thursday. The evaluation of the application went from about four stars out of five on Wednesday to a single star on Thursday. Robinhood users were misunderstood after the company stopped buying GameStop shares and other shares promoted by Reddit’s WallStreetBets community.
A Google spokesman confirmed that the tech giant deleted the reviews and defended the move overnight, telling Gizmodo via email that it has rules against “coordinated or inorganic reviews”. Gizmodo asked how negative reviews could be considered “inorganic” when people seem reasonably upset by Robinhood’s actions in recent days. Google stopped responding to Gizmodo emails after that investigation.
The Robinhood rating in the Google Play app store has returned to over four stars since Google deleted negative reviews. The app also has a 4.7 rating on the Apple app store, though it’s unclear what kind of moderation Apple has made on its reviews for Robinhood this week.
There are still questions about what prompted Robinhood to stop buying shares selected by WallStreetBets from Reddit on Thursday – shares that include not only GameStop, but also Nokia, Blackberry and AMC Theaters, among others. An early theory was that hedge funds that shortened stocks relied on Robinhood to stop trading, but an alternative theory emerged that Robinhood simply did not have the cash flow to continue processing so many stock purchases.
The latter theory seems to have been supported by a new report early Friday New York Times claiming that Robinhood raised about $ 1 billion from existing investors such as Sequoia Capital and Ribbit Capital. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has denied the company has liquidity problems CNBC yesterday, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t anticipate liquidity problems in the very near future.
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Robinhood users angry at the company’s decision to stop GameStop purchases have filed a collective process on Thursday, a move that seems to give credence to the idea that a negative evaluation of the application on Google Play is not necessarily “inorganic”.
It has been a turbulent week on the stock market, as Reddit activist investors have shown that the whole system is a scam in favor of the rich. But no one knows where the US financial markets will leave this in the coming days and weeks.
Most Americans know in their hearts that the game is rigged. But this week’s actions by Reddit activist investors have made the rules clear to everyone. The rich will not tolerate ordinary people to earn money while suffering.
The question is how far hedge fund managers and other wealthy people are willing to take this to defend their class interests. If history is a guide, the answer is “damn far enough.”