
Google removes over 5M reviews from Play Store to improve TikTok rating - sdan
https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/google-removes-over-5-million-reviews-from-play-store-to-improve-tiktok-rating-1681721-2020-05-25
======
chipperyman573
This really hits on a lot of nerves of the general HN crowd (especially when
these things are combined):

\- Google

\- "Censorship" (loosely defined)

\- China (vs India vs a US company, which could really be its own point)

But if you read the article it seems to be a logical decision. Google (likely)
did something similar for zoom:
[https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/03/24/zooms-android-
app-r...](https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/03/24/zooms-android-app-rating-
has-been-absolutely-destroyed-by-coronavirus/)

Assuming there's nothing left out by the author, I don't really think there's
anything newsworthy here, just something that google did that aligns with its
past actions (not to say it doesn't belong on HN)

~~~
frequentnapper
there was no China Vs India. Just Tiktok vs Youtube - really Indian Youtube
and Tiktok content creators dissing each other...

~~~
chipperyman573
I just meant that Tiktok is a chinese owned company (and therefore state-
owned). China has forced companies to do similar things before.

~~~
three_seagrass
Right, by strong-arming businesses with the threat of not having access to the
Chinese market - i.e. forcing Apple to move Chinese citizen cloud data to
government-owned data centers.

Google doesn't even have access to China so there's no financial motivation.

~~~
chipperyman573
In 2018 google demonstrated interest in re-entering the chinese market:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_\(search_engine\))

It wouldn't be a stretch to assume there's something going on behind the
scenes that China could use to force Google's hand. I'm not saying that's what
happened but that is a possible response I was thinking about when writing my
original comment.

~~~
three_seagrass
And summarily pulled out after Google employees revolted, showing that the
employees at Google care more about privacy than money than the employees at
Apple.

Google still doesn't have access to China and even if they tried it again, the
employees would leak and stop it again.

------
Barrin92
> _" Another reason was the enraged fans of famous Indian YouTuber Carry
> Minati flooding PlayStore with 1-star reviews.

Carry Minati had created a video titled YouTube Vs TikTok, part of an ongoing
feud between YouTube and TikTok users. His video went viral and was taken down
for violating YouTube’s terms of service. This happended because many TikTok
users reported the video saying it was bullying in nature."_

Seems reasonable enough to remove those because this is just brigarding and
has nothing to do with authentic users of the app.

~~~
frequentnapper
I happened to watch the video, which was a response to a Tiktok user
badmouthing Youtube creators. I didn't really see any bullying, just funny
retorts. I guess when it comes to Youtube, they just censor anything as long
as enough people complain.

~~~
Carpetsmoker
500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube _every minute_ ; it's impossible to
moderate all of that. "Lots of users reported it in a short timespan" is a
reasonable heuristic to quickly remove ISIS beheading videos and whatnot.

It's not perfect, but nothing YouTube does at this kind of scale will be.

~~~
frequentnapper
Right, but in addition, not providing any transparency to the content creator,
or any ability to appeal the decision or re-instate the video in my opinion is
unforgivable.

~~~
Carpetsmoker
Yeah, the entire process of dealing with exceptions (or indeed, anything that
involves human judgement) is atrocious at YouTube, and has been for many
years.

jwz wrote about this years ago as well (and there are many more stories):
[https://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/10/youtubes-joke-of-a-fair-
use...](https://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/10/youtubes-joke-of-a-fair-use-appeal-
process/)

That being said, I feel too many people fail to appreciate the problems
YouTube is facing and are too quick to simply shout "censorship!"

~~~
thrwaway69
That link calls me a brogrammer man child... My ego is hurt.

------
kumarvvr
I understand the need to remove "review bombs", but aren't review bombs
reviews too?

Say a company that develops a product says or does something insensitive, in
the earlier days, people would publicly boycott that product, related products
or what have you. The company would either stand down and apologize, or put
it's foot down and say it's right.

Now picture the same thing with Tik-Tok. There are innumerable instances where
Tik-tok has been shown to be biased, censors specific content, etc etc.

Review bombing is as good as boycotting a company. Causing a company real
consequences in response to their actions.

It's a form of rightful protest. I am not using the product. I am expressing
my views about the product in a review system that is public and open. As long
as there are no bots involves, Google is morally wrong, in my view.

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
The point of a reviews from an app store's perspective is to help users decide
whether they would benefit from an app. That some subreddit or Twitter or
whatever decides to brigade a particular app does not necessarily provide much
signal about whether a generic user will want an app. An app marketplace is
not generally going to be interested in facilitating boycotts on apps in the
given marketplace. If it wants an app boycotted, it can ban it. Otherwise, the
incentives are probably not aligned.

------
hn_throwaway_99
Curious, how is India Today generally regarded in India? I ask because to me
the style and tone of this article sounds like something that came out of an
elementary school newspaper. E.g. "It was still the talk of the town but for
all the wrong reasons", "could be the result of Google removing user reviews
so that the app could get some balance." The hackneyed cliches and oddly
stating a presumption as fact just strike me as extremely juvenile.

I'm in no way saying US news is better, and it is often times much worse, but
it's usually not worse in the way this article is.

~~~
dartharva
It's kind of the state of Indian news media of this generation. All outlets
are crazy for making even mundane coverage as dramatic as possible to compete.

------
cscurmudgeon
People are discussing this as a China vs India thing.

It is not.

People recently found that TikTok is extremely lax in dealing with content
that promotes violence.

[https://www.newsweek.com/india-tik-tok-faizal-siddiqui-
acid-...](https://www.newsweek.com/india-tik-tok-faizal-siddiqui-acid-
attack-1505122)

~~~
dkdk8283
Or Youtube takes an extreme viewpoint banning anything remotely close to
content with weapons.

~~~
cscurmudgeon
Tiktok too takes an extreme viewpoint banning anything remotely close to
offending China.

~~~
partiallypro
Yeah, I remember a Tiktocker getting banned for pointing out that China has
Muslims in concentration camps and it barely made the news cycle. Tiktok found
something else she had also violated and used that as a banning offense...but
we all know full well they would have never enforced that were it not for her
CCP rant. Tiktok has a lot of creatives on it, but I worry that it's a bit of
an infiltration.

------
londons_explore
I'd take a guess the real explanation is far simpler... Google let's anyone
write a review, but if an end-of-week logs analysis shows that you never
installed the app, or that the review was written via tor from an account
created 30 seconds ago, then it's removed as spam.

~~~
plumeria
Does it work like this for all apps?

~~~
londons_explore
I guess so

------
MintelIE
Were they real reviews, or Indian review-bombs generated as part of a
nationalistic campaign to get back at China?

Review sections were weaponized long ago, first by companies, and now,
increasingly, by nations.

~~~
katktv
Indian review-bombs, but for the other reasons entirely. The dumb ones as
well.

------
tehlike
Google did this as part of review integrity. Doesn't have anything to do with
censorship, as far as i can tell.

disclaimer: ex-google employee, who did not work in play.

~~~
halfjew22
Work in play, heh...

Silly puns aside though, I definitely agree with your viewpoint.

------
Thorrez
>to improve TikTok rating

The article gives no evidence of this. Sure the rating improved from 1.2/5 to
1.5/5, but that doesn't mean it's the purpose of the removal.

------
tiktokVsYoutube
Posting from a throwaway account - This article barely scratches the surface.
This was a very entertaining story that I followed to the minute and here’s
some context:

Tiktok content, specifically in India, from the very start has been very[1]
very[2] _cringy_ (weird hairstyles, weird things being said, weird ways of
expressing friendship, love, etc). I don’t mean the cringe that you associate
with western Tiktok content but for some reason majority of what the Indian
kids were producing stood out as being beyond cringe to existing internet
users (mainly Youtube / Instagram userbase). I suspect this has to do with the
millions of first-time internet / smartphone users on Tiktok + the heavy
influence of exaggerated emotional Bollywood drama now being done in 15
seconds on a smartphone.

Youtube on the other hand obviously had an existing audience that was used to
consuming content of a certain level of quality / production. Apart from just
pure cringe content, Tiktok obviously did not bother with copyright
infringements much and in fact promoted the concept of people plagiarizing
each other’s work. So the Youtube / IG communities started making memes and
calling out the cringe and bad content of Tiktok.

At some point one of the big influencers on Tiktok (Amir Siddiqui referred to
in this article) provoked one of the biggest Indian Youtuber, Carryminati who
is known for roasting people. Amir made a video saying Tiktok videos require
talent, hard work, and a lot more dedication than Youtube videos and basically
asked Carry to roast him.

Carry then took on the challenge and released an 8-minute roast video that
beautifully called out all the cringe that tiktok users make, things that Amir
had done in the past, etc. That Youtube roast video set several records within
hours. The roast was actually so effective, it was hilarious to browse through
Tiktok for the next few days as the entire Tiktok community sort of agreed and
started making fun of each other and that single video actually shook the
entire Tiktok community.

About 5-6 days later, Youtube took down the video (which was now the highest
liked video of India by far) without explanation probably after receiving
thousands of flags from tiktok users. It’s worth mentioning that the roast
included comparisons of Amir to being a eunuch multiple times among other
questionable insults because of his past tiktok videos. In my opinion, the
video was definitely not trying to be Politically Correct but it wasn’t bad
enough to be taken down.

Once the video was taken down, the Youtube and Instagram(meme pages) community
started a campaign to leave a 1-star rating for Tiktok on the playstore and
basically destroyed their rating which was about 4.5 when this started.

In case you’re wondering, I am an avid HN reader, an accomplished software
engineer but I do spend about 5% of my free time enjoying Indian cringe. In
fact I curate a big list of my favorites and share with my friends but very
few people actually enjoy the cringe.

Was it worth explaining all of this to one of the most intellectually
stimulating forums on the internet? Probably not. But I had to admit to myself
that I know a lot more about this story than I’m proud to admit and that it
would make me happy that it gets saved in the HN archive.

A copy of the original video that was taken down by Youtube -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoZ241zUgbA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoZ241zUgbA)

[1] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciYohWR2Pio](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciYohWR2Pio)
[2] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg9gjmcHgE8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg9gjmcHgE8)

~~~
AlbertoGP
_A copy of the original video that was taken down by Youtube
-[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoZ241zUgbA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoZ241zUgbA)
_

Well, that copy has also been removed, and now I’m curious to see it. Is there
any other copy around?

Edit: OK, here it is as part of a “reaction” video, and includes English
subtitles:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqxs6S2sc30&t=2m10s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqxs6S2sc30&t=2m10s)

------
tw1912112
This is a really good case for network effects. If you go through the reviews,
a lot of people are complaining that they are not getting any "views" for
their content. As more and more people are bombing the reviews, uninstalling,
it's discouraging people from creating more content because it's not being
viewed enough.

Does anyone know if disabling views or delaying gratification of content will
reduce the damaging effect on the TikTok network?

Also, vis-a-vis Yelp, why should review bombs be removed when I can go to a
restaurant and review it as 1-rated if I am not treated well by them even if I
don't complete any transaction?

------
sloshnmosh
The Google Play Store reviews are pretty much worthless and corrupted by
ratings farms and app developers that steal the users google credentials to
post fake 5 star reviews from within the app itself. There was a time where
you didn’t have the option to only view negative reviews. At least that has
improved to where users have options in a drop-down menu.

------
DigitallyFidget
It has only a 1.4 star rating as of right now. It clearly didn't do anything
to help the rating of the app.

~~~
dzhiurgis
Oh wow. Why such difference with iOS store where it’s over 4?

Edit: it’s all clearly spam on Google Store

~~~
duskwuff
It's even more obvious on the "lite" version of their app. Within the last
month (probably even more recently), the total number of installs nearly
doubled, and the rating dropped from a reasonably stable 4.0 to 1.1.

[https://www.androidrank.org/application/tiktok_lite/com.zhil...](https://www.androidrank.org/application/tiktok_lite/com.zhiliaoapp.musically.go)

(Amusingly, the ratings of the other TikTok app, which looks like it might not
be available in India, are unaffected:
[https://www.androidrank.org/application/tiktok/com.ss.androi...](https://www.androidrank.org/application/tiktok/com.ss.android.ugc.trill))

I have a _very_ hard time believing that this represents organic user
behavior. It seems far more likely that someone's scripted the process of
installing and rating the apps.

------
presiozo
Seems like every major tech company bows in front of the Chinese government.
This is really scary

------
shadowgovt
I wonder if there's any signal to disambiguate whether Google decided to kill
the reviews or algorithmically determined 5 million accounts were bots, and
those bots also happened to have been used in a TikTok brigading campaign.

------
OwnsE
I thought review manipulation goes against google policy? Or this only applies
for apps with a limited budget?

------
nwienert
I just stumbled on a site that heavily leans on the “tech is censoring Trump”
angle, namely this article about Google taking down a study on
Hydroxycholoquine. I thought of posting it to front page, but instead I can
just attach to this other timely thread of Google being evil/censors.

Genuinely curious about info people have around this, if it is legit or not.
It seems like something you’d have expected to see here front page, but then
again this site leans left.

[https://defyccc.com/google-deleted-covid19-cure-
paper/](https://defyccc.com/google-deleted-covid19-cure-paper/)

~~~
kragen
It looks fake. Would a real medical researcher refer to SARS-CoV-2 as
"coronavirus" in the title, as if they didn't know there were other common
human coronaviruses? Why are they publishing on Google Drive instead of
MedrXiv? Why is the last author a lawyer? Why does it say "Stanford PhD" in
the byline? Dr. Broker (the first author) does seem to have been doing
biomedical research at UAB last year
([https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336977942_Targeting...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336977942_Targeting_DNA_Damage_Response_as_a_Strategy_to_Treat_HPV_Infections/download)
is a legitimate virology research paper he worked on, which doesn't make
obvious errors like the above), but
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200403213718/https://www.uab.e...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200403213718/https://www.uab.edu/medicine/biochem/56-tom-
broker-phd) suggests he was gone by April 3.
[https://www.peakprosperity.com/forum-topic/chloroquine-
hoax/](https://www.peakprosperity.com/forum-topic/chloroquine-hoax/) says he
was born in 1944, so he'd be 76?

Hmm, [https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8143845/Malaria-
cur...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8143845/Malaria-cure-
coronavirus-promoter-cryptocurrency-hustler-fake-Stanford-University-
claim.html) says, "Professor Thomas Broker, who was named in the 'white paper'
before it was removed from Google, asked for his name to be disassociated with
it, while the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he works, said a
claim that Nobel Prize winner Dr. Louise Chow's laboratory was involved was
also false."

"…the university's public relations manager Bob Shepard added that Dr. Chow, a
Nobel-prize winner mentioned in the acknowledgments, was no part of the study.

"'No one at UAB has any connection to this paper,' Shepard said.

"Shepard said that Broker 'had previously done research into chloroquine as a
possible therapy for human papillomavirus' which is more commonly known as
HPV.

"Shepard said: 'He had some contact with one of the authors of that paper at
that time. He had no involvement with the work on coronavirus and is not
affiliated with that research in any way.'"

Now, I don't want to depend on the Daily Mail, but it seems like they may
happen to have been correct in this case.

~~~
nwienert
Yea would like to see source outside DailyMail.

Also to people downvoting, why? I’m not backing the source, I’m just curious.

~~~
kragen
Okay, but it's immediately clear that nobody who wrote this paper is
knowledgeable about virology or the norms of academic publishing — but they
were trying to fake it. Yet the first author is claimed to be a real person
who is in fact a virologist with lots of academic publications.

How about Wired? [https://www.wired.com/story/an-old-malaria-drug-may-fight-
co...](https://www.wired.com/story/an-old-malaria-drug-may-fight-covid-19-and-
silicon-valleys-into-it/)

> _Except for that video, which hadn’t come out yet, Rigano put all that
> together and got in touch with Todaro. “I essentially wrote the publication
> based on my interface with various Stanford researchers and others, and we
> developed this body of evidence and hardcore science,” Rigano says. “James,
> Dr. Todaro, was doing the best job, I thought, of anyone in the media, any
> doctor, any news outlet, anyone on Twitter, of covering coronavirus. I’d
> been following his research on other items, like decentralized computing,
> for several years.”_

> _Todaro, who got an MD from Columbia and is now a bitcoin investor, was
> interested enough to collaborate on the document. “I added stuff that
> pertained more to the medical side of things, and gave a more, I guess,
> clinical feel to it,” Todaro says. “Something that Big Pharma is not going
> to like—it’s widely available, it’s pretty cheap, and it’s something that at
> least a million people are already on. It’s really got a lot of the aspects
> of something that can be rolled out quickly if the right clinical data is
> there.”_

> _Todaro and Rigano together started talking to Raoult about the small study
> he was then preparing, and they also called a retired biochemist named Tom
> Broker. He was originally listed as the first author of the Google doc, his
> name followed by “(Stanford).” That’s where Broker got his PhD, in 1972, but
> Broker has been, for years, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His
> area of research is adenovirus and human papillomavirus, which have DNA as
> their genetic material, as opposed to the RNA inside coronaviruses. They’re
> pretty different._

> _Broker says he wasn’t involved in producing the Google doc and would never
> advocate the use of a drug without formal trials. Todaro and Rigano have
> since removed his name from it, at Broker’s request. “I neither contributed
> to, wrote any part of, nor had knowledge of this google.com document. I have
> never conducted research on RNA virus pathogens … I have no professional
> credentials or authority to suggest or recommend clinical trials or
> practices,” Broker wrote in an email. “Apparently I was inserted as a
> ‘gratuitous’ author, a practice that I have always avoided over my 53-year
> career. Moreover, I have never engaged any part of social media, privately
> or professionally. All of my scientific publications are processed through
> peer review. I suggest that you communicate with one of the actual
> authors.”_

> _Asked about Broker’s statement, Todaro says that Broker just didn’t want to
> engage with the attention the idea and document were getting “I don’t
> personally know Tom Broker. My correspondence has been with Mr. Rigano,”
> Todaro says. “When we started getting inquiries from the press, my
> impression was, Mr. Broker got very overwhelmed by that.”_

So, according to Wired, the "paper"'s _first author_ says that its real
authors put his name on the paper without his knowledge or consent, which is
dishonest (it goes far beyond the usual questionable practice of "gratuitous
author" insertion, which places your sponsor as the _last_ author), and that
he disagrees with what it says. The "paper" is obviously not the kind of thing
a real professor would produce. The real authors say he's lying.

It seems clear to me who's lying here. Wired caught them lying about a lot of
other things, too.

~~~
ketzu
In general, even having a sponsor as an author, the sponsor should still
consent to being on there in some form.

~~~
kragen
Are you talking about morality or common practice? Morally you shouldn't claim
someone is an author when they're just giving you money. Common practice in
biomedical research is to do so without even telling them about the paper. But
as last author, not first.

~~~
ketzu
I was naively thinking they had that in their grant agreements. As a computer
scientist I know that people end up on the paper that didn't write it. But I
haven't had the case where people didn't know they were on it.

Thanks for the insight!

------
PunksATawnyFill
YouTube and TikTok are cavalcades of human stupidity.

Things aren't getting better.

~~~
ketzu
Entertainment is not inherently stupid and videos on both platforms are not
inherently entertainment or stupid. They mostly seem like a cross section of
overall internet content (minus porn), which represents a large part of
society as a whole.

For some reason people seem compelled to declare popular things they dislike
as stupid, but that seems very unnecessary.

