Between 200 and 250 1 star reviews over the last 12 hours, more or less half of all those that the structure has accumulated over the years on Google Maps, which have dropped its evaluation to 3.1 out of 5: since the blogger Selvaggia Lucarelli talked about it on Facebook, the Finale Ligure tavern of the “2 euros for a saucer” is evidently the subject of so-called review bombing.
Since late afternoon yesterday, Monday 7 August, hundreds of people have gathered linked to his page on Maps and left a bad rating, precisely from 1 star only, to show their opposition to the restaurant. Not because they ate badly but because they don’t share this way of doing.
What is review bombing, the precedents
With the term review bombing, entered in the Internet dictionary for more or less 5 yearsrefers to the storm of negative reviews that hit a product, a film or a restaurant, to cripple it and prevent its success due to something not necessarily related to its qualities and characteristics.
Review bombing is a way to shitstorm and covers the most diverse areas: in 2019 it hit Family Link, the Google app used by parents to check their children’s smartphones, which showed their opposition with hundreds of negative reviews; always on Maps I am often a victim of (for example) the bathing facilities that do not accept animals; during the pandemic there were many cases of review bombing against bars, restaurants and Italian shops asking for the Green Pass to customers.
Last year, a famous case of review bombing was the one unleashed (involuntarily?) by Elon Musk against The Rings of Powerthe Amazon TV series set in the Lord of the Rings universe, which would have been guilty of not respecting Tolkien’s original works, between black-skinned elves and female characters deemed excessively strong and dominant.
As you can see, review bombing affects regardless of the actual quality of the product: you give a low or very low rating to a film not because you didn’t like that film, but because (perhaps) the director or screenwriter took an unwelcome position on something.
During the night the intervention of Google
Right or wrong, review bombing is a concrete demonstration of how great the power of social networks is and how what happens online can have concrete consequences in the real world. For a restaurant, having a rating of less than 4, if not even less than 3, on Maps is a big obstacle: many people do searches by filtering by votes, and having such a low rating means practically never appearing. It means being invisible, not existing for hundreds of potential customers.
In the specific case of the Finale Ligure tavern, a couple of things have been happening in the last few hours that try to rebalance the situation: between the night and the early hours of the day, numerous 5-star reviews are appearing, equally from people who may not have ever eaten there but want to show “solidarity towards the staff”; moreover, many of the recent scores of 1-star reviews have evidently been removed by Google.
Going back to the votes prior to the story, it must be said that there were not a few real customers who complained about the tavern’s pricing policy, but this is obviously another story.