The tech-giant Google has come to the rescue of controversial Chinese social media platform TikTok by deleting millions of negative reviews from its Play Store, in an attempt to improve the rating of the application.
According to the reports, Google has removed nearly than 7 million negative reviews for TikTok which has ultimately improved its rating. Last week on May 20, the ratings of the controversial app had plunged to 1.3 starts after millions of social media users had massively downrated the Chinese app for enabling its users to promote and glorify various horrific crimes and anti-Hindu propaganda.
A screenshot of the TikTok app’s page on the Play Store included in an OpIndia story on 20 May show that the app had 27,606,482 reviews on that day. However, at the time of writing this story, the app has only 20,356,083 reviews on the Play Store, indicating that Google has removed close to 7 million negative reviews reported against the Chinese app. The ratings of the app have now been upgraded to 4.4 stars from 1.3 stars a week before.
The above two images clearly show that on 20 May, majority of reviews that the app got was 1 star, but now 5 star reviews are highest, while 1 star reviews get a distant second place.
Nobert Elekes, a verified Twitter user and a data analyst, had also made similar allegations against Google and also posted images of tech-giant deleting reviews against TikTok app. Taking to Twitter, he had said, “Apparently, Google deleted over a million TikTok reviews overnight, that’s why the rating increased from 1.2 to 1.6 stars.”
Apparently, Google deleted over a million TikTok reviews overnight, that’s why the rating increased from 1.2 to 1.6 stars. pic.twitter.com/pDylX8BwcT
— Norbert Elekes (@NorbertElekes) May 22, 2020
His tweet showed a screenshot in which Play Store showed 28 million reviews and the rating was 1.2 stars. In another screenshot, it can be seen that the reviews were a million less, however, the rating of the app had gone up to 1.6 stars.
Downgrading of Chinese app – TikTok
The downgrading of the Chinese app emerged after a war had broken out some days ago between the TikTok’s so-called social media ‘influencers’ and the Youtube content creators that led to a series of revelations about the way TikTok is being used to incite and glorify the worst crimes.
Following that, several social media users had reported how the Chinese app is propagating hate crimes by enabling ‘TikTok influencers’ to glorify hate crimes against Hindus. Ever since the coronavirus epidemic spread across the country, the Chinese video-sharing service gained prominence in India.
The Chinese app which was misused, on multiple occasions, by anti-social elements, put out video inciting crimes against women. Amidst the Coronavirus outbreak, several Muslim creators on TikTok were seen encouraging people to flout social distancing guidelines under the garb of Islamic preachings.
A social media user named Faizal Siddiqui had also shockingly recreated a disturbing scene of an acid attack, leaving social media users angry. A complaint was also registered against the ‘TikTok influencer’ for promoting acid attack as a means to avenge lost love by jilted lovers.
