Why genuine reviews vanish, and fakes survive

But there is a separate thing, recognised by regulators as its own kind of misconduct, which is review suppression: not the honest removal of a fake, but the quiet burial of genuine criticism. Telling the two apart matters, because one is an imperfect system and the other is a practice the law now watches.

Legitimate removal versus suppression

Reviews can fairly be removed for clear reasons, applied the same way to positive and negative ones: a fabricated transaction, private or confidential information, unlawful content, or something plainly off-topic. The problem is suppression that targets honest negatives specifically, putting them through extra hurdles or slow queues while positives publish instantly, pushing them behind extra clicks while advertising the overall score as comprehensive, or using baseless legal threats to frighten genuine reviewers into silence. Regulators have been explicit that misrepresenting a displayed set of reviews as representative, when negatives have been filtered out, is deceptive, and that negatives should not face tougher treatment than positives.

Why this matters to you, and the limit

This is why a wall of nothing but five stars is a signal rather than a triumph, and why a business that suppresses its honest criticism is not just being unfair, it is on the wrong side of the rules. The limit is fairness in the other direction: a single vanished review is far more likely to be an imperfect filter than a conspiracy, and you have the same flagging and appeal routes everyone else does. The lesson is not that the system is rigged against you, it is that an honest spread, criticism included, is what both the filters and the customers are built to trust.