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Comment by eastendguy | Hacker News Reader

I can confirm this. I personally know of two companies were accurate but negative reviews were taken down by Glassdoor. One was the company I worked for. In this case it was triggered at the request of the CEO, who was heavily criticized in the reviews. He made HR sign up for a Glassdoor Premium account, so that they took the reviews down.

All negative reviews were 100% accurate from my point of view and not insulting in any way. So if you see the "managed account" flag at Glassdoor, be careful ;)

It seems the trick is to say that the reviews contain "company internal information",...or something like that.

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So Glassdoor is pay for prestige.

Just like Yelp. Quite tragic that this is the business model that seems to succeed.. if the law protected individuals over corporate greed, this tactic would be illegal.

Contrary to what the GP is saying, Glassdoor seems EXTREMELY resistant unless the review is actually fake and/or contains proprietary information. It's absolutely nothing like Yelp.

I do understand that they have their "own" system that automatically reviews posts and removes them. Sadly that hasn't worked out fantastically at my employer, they mostly remove these 5 star reviews.

Another reason why Glassdoor takes down negative reviews is that often the 1 or 2 star reviews don't follow their content guidelines [0].

- [Your review should be truthful and constitute your own personal opinion] -- Any review that contains false information that the company can easily prove is wrong can be removed.

- [Each individual is allowed one review, per employer, per year, per review type.] If the company can prove a review is a dup, it can be removed

- [We do not allow reviews that include negative comments about identifiable individuals outside of this group.] - A review saying "My coworker Alice was a real A Hole." can easily be removed

- [We realize talking about work can get emotionally charged, but we don't approve reviews that include certain profanities] -- Anything that's aggressively worded "I worked at this company, it fu* sucks" will be removed

I'd guess than 90% of Glassdoor reviews removed blatantly break their guidelines. There is probably another 10% that consist of companies trying to game the system, but it's impossible to know for sure.

[0] https://help.glassdoor.com/article/Community-Guidelines/en_U...

Great points, and some of the 20 reviews in my anecdotal sample meet this criteria. However most do not break any of these rules, and are simple, factual (as far as I can tell, I dont work there) reviews about why they do not recommend working at this company, yet they are removed - sometimes in as little as 12-24 hours.

The company I am referencing is a premium member with a “marked” post (5 stars) at the top of their page.

So, why does Glassdoor apparently listen to CEOs an lawyers when they claim employers cannot have reviews removed, when they appear to be doing just that?

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