So, this does go to show that Robinhood's delisting of GameStop and AMC may have repercussions going into the future, even if Google was able to hold back the initial review bombing. While this is a common response when trying to give an accurate rating of any product, removing almost 100,000 user ratings is an extreme that most companies in this position haven't been forced to resort to. Viewers will notice that the total number of reviews has jumped down from over 274,000 to just over 178,000, leaving the majority of remaining reviews at 5-star ratings. The following image courtesy of 9to5Google shows what the app's rating was before the purge: In the case of the recent review bombing of Robinhood, the situation is a little more complicated, on one part because Google had to remove almost 100,000 negative reviews in order to salvage the app's rating from a 1-star to a 4-star. It's a strategy that websites like Metacritic have used before in order to keep the effects of online outrage organized by players who may have never played a game from affecting a review score without having actually been able to form a real opinion of their own. This exact tactic used simply required Google to find a number of new ratings that marked Robinhood at 1-star, the lowest available on the Play Store, and remove them. RELATED: Wall Street Bets SubReddit Appears to Have Been Taken Down Amid GameStop Stock Surges The tech conglomerate used a tactic that many critic aggregating websites have used before to keep knee-jerk reactions from affecting the state of a product before, effectively saving Robinhood from consequences of the GameStop trading freeze. However, as the Redditors and other onlookers retaliated against Robinhood by review bombing the app on the Google Play Store, Google rushed in to halt the quick ratings decline.
This recent attack on the app is in response to Robinhood halting stock trading for GameStop, the gaming retailer that set off this whole situation due to the way a number of hedge funds had been manipulating the market. The ongoing conflict between the Stock Market and the Wallstreetbets subreddit continues to ignite as stock traders attempt to fire back at the popular trading app Robinhood.