Google removed at least 100,000 negative reviews of the Robinhood stock trading app from the Google Play app store after angry users sent a torrent of critical reviews that caused the app’s rating to plummet Thursday. The app’s rating went from about four out of five on Wednesday to just one star on Thursday. Robinhood users were understandably upset after the company stopped purchases of GameStop stock and other stocks promoted by Reddit’s WallStreetBets community.
A Google spokesperson confirmed that the tech giant has removed the reviews and defended the move overnight by telling Gizmodo via email that it has rules against ‘coordinated or inorganic reviews’. Gizmodo asked how negative reviews can be considered “inorganic” when people seem to be fairly upset about Robinhood’s actions in recent days. Google no longer responded to the emails from Gizmodo after that investigation.
Robinhood’s rating on the Google Play App Store has risen to more than four stars since Google removed the negative reviews. The app also has a 4.7 rating in Apple’s App Store, although it’s not clear what kind of moderation Apple has done this week on its reviews for Robinhood.
There are still questions as to what actually prompted Robinhood to stop the stock purchases picked by Reddit’s WallStreetBets on Thursday – stocks that include not just GameStop, but Nokia, Blackberry, and AMC Theaters, among others. An early theory was that hedge funds shorting stocks had relied on Robinhood to stop trading, but an alternative theory emerged that Robinhood simply did not have the cash flow to keep processing so many stock purchases.
The latter theory appears to have been supported by a new report early Friday New York Times claim that Robinhood raised approximately $ 1 billion from existing investors such as Sequoia Capital and Ribbit Capital. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev denied that the company had liquidity problems CNBC yesterday, but that does not mean that there were no liquidity problems in the very near future.
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Robinhood users angry about the company’s decision to discontinue GameStop’s purchases filed one class action lawsuit on Thursday, a move that seems to give credence to the idea that a negative app rating on Google Play isn’t necessarily “inorganic.”
It’s been a turbulent week in the stock market as activist retail investors have shown on Reddit that the whole system is a scam in favor of the rich. But no one knows where that the coming days and weeks will leave the US financial markets.
Most Americans know in their hearts that the game has been counterfeited. But this week’s actions by activist investors on Reddit really made the rules clear to the whole world. The rich will not tolerate average people making money while suffering.
The question is to what extent hedge fund managers and other wealthy people are willing to take this to defend their class interests. If history is any guide, the answer is “pretty damn distant”.