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The late revenge
An online rating or review is quickly written. Maybe there was an incident in the store or a package arrived late and you quickly sit down at your computer and write a long review on Google or Amazon. Many use review platforms as a way of getting revenge and dispelling bad feelings, but be careful: A bad online review can be expensive and end up in court if you don’t know the law.
Anyone can read it
Reviews on the Internet are written very quickly. Nevertheless, the same rules apply as if you were to publish in a newspaper or something similar. So it is particularly important that untruths and insults fall out. For something like that, you can be warned directly, receive a complaint or, in the best case, get a mail that you should delete the rating before legal action is taken. According to Schnelllegal.de, insults and the like have been filtered out by Google since 2020, but it should be noted here that untruths or factual claims that need to be proven are not detected by the algorithm.
Abusive criticism is expensive
So you should be careful what you write because everyone can read the review. In general, these fall under the right to freedom of expression, but since it is mostly about the relationship between customer and company, limits are usually quickly shown. The abusive criticism represents the limit of freedom of expression, according to specialist lawyer Markus Timm in an interview with 123recht.de. You should rather limit your rating to facts, because of course there is no right to deletion just because the review is bad.
What reviews mean to consumers
According to the NDR, companies have recently been very committed to taking action against bad ratings. For the simple reason that this is becoming increasingly important to customers. There are often entire law firms that specialize in this. However, it is essential for the consumer that there are often a large number of fake reviews on platforms. A point of reference here is that the texts of the ratings are very similar or that there are very large discrepancies in a category from one to five stars. For example, products with many one and five star ratings.
Johann N. Werther / Editor finanzen.net
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