Comment by brainwad

Multiple people report that comments such as "Service was slow", or three star rating without comment were removed.

If Google started to show how many reviews were removed, it was because the lawfare started to seriously affect the ratings.

There are agencies in Germany where you can buy review removals in a web shop for like 50 euros per review.

You just have to link the review and they will send Google a legal document to delete it.

I wrote a one star review and posted pictures of a badly burnt pizza served at a restaurant in Berlin. Google sent me an email telling me they removed that because the restaurant filed a defamation claim

That is in practice not true. If you leave a fake but glowing 5-star review, no business will challenge it. But if you leave a 1, 2, 3, or even 4-star review, suddenly you're asked to provide proof. Of course, they can legally challenge a 5-star review as well. But in reality they conveniently don't seem to care about those.

Anyway, Germany is probably one of the few places where this happens. The issue isn't necessarily that reviews can be challenged. The issue is that users aren't informed when they leave a review that they may later be required to provide proof of their visit.

I once left a negative review of a very popular touristy business in Germany after a genuinely terrible experience. I included photos and detailed information, yet they still challenged the review, claiming I had never been a customer. Google then required me to provide additional evidence to prove that I had actually visited the place.

What made it even more frustrating is that they challenged the review two years in a row. After the second challenge, I wrote to them that if they continued contesting the review, I would consider it harassment and pursue legal action. After that, they stopped.

What I find pretty shady is that most businesses seem to wait a year or two before contesting reviews. By that point, most people no longer have receipts, invoices, or other documentation. If they challenged reviews immediately, customers would be much more likely to still have that evidence available. In my case, I take photos frequently, so Google accepted my proof and kept the review online.

Ironically, after going through this process myself, I've come to believe that some form of verification should probably be standard worldwide. Requiring reviewers to provide evidence that they were actually customers could help reduce fake reviews. But if that's going to be the standard, it should be clearly communicated upfront, before people submit their reviews.

Another related issue I have with Google Maps is that, at least in my home country, some places have reviews disabled because Google considers them too prone to polarization or controversy. Schools are one example.

Personally, I think that's a terrible idea. I'd rather be able to read the reviews and make up my own mind. Instead, Google, in its infinite wisdom, decides that certain topics are too contentious for users to see feedback at all.

I find that to be one of the worst decisions made by the Google Maps team. Hiding reviews doesn't eliminate disagreement or bias, it just removes information that users could otherwise evaluate for themselves.

Nope, that is not defamation. Both defamation and libel require it to be a false statement. If you did find a cockroach or your plate was dirty, you can freely say so without needing to provide extensive proof.

Is this self contradictory?

Making a claim of 3 star service, without providing 3 star service evidence, isn't any different than a claim like they don't clean the dishes enough. Sure, you didn't write out the exact words, but by submitting the review, you still submitted such a claim, and so it remains a question of if you provided evidence to prove it, which gets into how deep the legal system wants the evidence verified (is a picture enough, or do you need to provide evidence the picture is of the store at the date and time relevant to your review).

Also competitors would leave shit reviews and Googles completely brick walling any way to rectify or moderate reviews made it a shit service in true Google fashion. Google and service live in two different worlds.

>I heard that they don't clean the dishes enough

Is that defamation? That isn't a statement of fact, that's just relaying what you heard.

If I relay what the Daily Mail says, am I also guilty of defamation, or can I rely on what others say?

I think it was ruled that 1 star review without any words at all can be considered a defamation

People don't need LLMs to lie, and someone in the comments tells a similar experience. You can also find plenty of similar anecdotes using a search engine of your choice.

You can even find many articles from specialized lawyers if you search in German: https://www.prinz.law/bewertungen/klage-zugestellt-wegen-neg...

Yeah, I agree about the LLM part.

But can confirm from personal experience that businesses threaten to sue based on Google Maps reviews.

A lot of people use LLMs to clean up their sloppy text. Not realizing how fake it makes them sound. non-native speakers lacking confidence in their English are a type of llm abuser. It doesn't necessarily make the content fake.

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Public-facing LLMs are a horrible liability.

Which is what thay should be in any sane environments. LLMs can be wonderful tools, but they cannot be trusted.

No more of a horrible liability than a human writing public-facing copy.

Good.

Shocking, only 10 short years since this (when Merkel was Chancellor): Turkey asks Germany to prosecute comedian Jan Böhmermann (Germany's equivalent of John Stewart) over Erdoğan poem

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11474967

"Germany's leader" - that's how you know it's a low-brow article.

I think that will depend. If person publishes it as their own speech Google is likely not fully liable. On other hand as Google publishes it as their own speech on their own site well they are fully liable.

To me it seems pretty reasonable that content Google generates with Gemini and publishes on their own google.com domain is their speech. Or at least they are fully editorially responsible.

Sure that could be the worst case. But then we are in the case law vs. continental law debate for lawyers.

When I wrote "Gemini is not illegal" it would have been more correct to say that the court has not decided about Gemini but specifically about search.

And I do think it makes sense to distinguish between explicitly chatting with an LLM and entering something in the search bar people have used for decades now.

Based on the article, the problem isn't that Google is attempting to present the AI Overview as "search" to the users. Google is attempting to claim to the court that AI Overviews are just like search, and the court isn't buying it.

The problem here is that

1) the AI Overview is giving incorrect information, and

2) it is Google's own words

...which makes Google liable for anything false there.

They weren't liable for false statements in search results, because that was 100% other people's content, being linked to, with a small blurb taken directly from their words. With the AI Overviews, regardless of whether it's getting its information from other people's content, it's remixing it based on Gemini's algorithms and synthesising statements that are frequently wrong.