In this article4 sections · 5 min
Facebook: recommendations, not star reviews
Facebook does not have star reviews in the way Google does. It has Recommendations — a yes or no, with text attached.
For a business under a coordinated attack — a pile-on after a news story, a brigading campaign, a wave of one-line posts from accounts with no connection to you — what matters is which of those recommendations break Facebook’s rules.
What Facebook removes
- Content that breaches the Community Standards — harassment, hate speech, threats, obscenity.
- Spam and content posted to promote something else.
- Impersonation and fake accounts, which is the most productive route when the attack is coordinated.
- Recommendations that are not about an experience with the business at all.
- Personal information about an individual.
The strongest case is usually against the accounts rather than only the posts. A coordinated wave is almost always run from accounts that breach Facebook’s policies on authenticity, and that is a much stronger case than arguing about the content of any single recommendation — which is how our team builds it.
TripAdvisor: no opting out, and it usually matters
A hotel or restaurant cannot remove its TripAdvisor listing and cannot disable reviews on it. The page exists whether the business engages or not, and in hospitality it is frequently the first result a traveller reads after the website itself. That makes it the opposite case to Facebook: worth real attention, because there is no way to opt out of it.
What TripAdvisor removes
- Reviews from people with no first-hand experience of the property.
- Second-hand accounts — a review written about someone else’s stay.
- Conflict of interest, including competitors and anyone connected to the business.
- Content aimed at an individual member of staff rather than the experience.
- Personal information, hate speech, obscenity and threats.
- Reviews describing an experience outside the period the platform accepts, and reviews posted to the wrong property — which happens constantly with chains and with properties that share a name.
TripAdvisor also has a published policy on review fraud, including blackmail — a guest threatening a bad review unless something is given for free. That is worth knowing about, because it is common, and because the platform treats it as a serious matter rather than a commercial dispute.
Wrong-property reviews are the quiet win
The most under-used case on TripAdvisor is the simplest: the review is about a different property. Guests confuse branches of the same chain, hotels with similar names in the same town, and restaurants that have changed hands. This is factual, provable and not a matter of opinion, which makes it one of the more straightforward cases there is.
Our free audit reads your recent reviews looking for exactly this: dates that match no booking, facilities you do not have, a location you are not in.
Management responses do more work than removals here
Hospitality readers behave differently from other buyers: they read the reviews and they read the replies, and they are looking for how a property handles a problem. A management response is visible to every future guest and it stays there permanently.
The response that works is short, specific and free of defensiveness. Acknowledge the one thing that went wrong, state what changed as a result, and stop. Do not dispute the guest’s account line by line, do not mention how many other guests were happy that week, and never suggest the reviewer is lying in public unless you are certain and prepared to be quoted on it.
Where to spend the effort
For most businesses outside hospitality, Facebook recommendations are a minor signal and TripAdvisor is irrelevant, and the honest advice is to spend the time on the platform your customers actually use to choose.
For a hotel, a restaurant or a visitor attraction the order reverses. TripAdvisor is often worth more attention than anything else, because the page cannot be removed, ranks for the property name, and is read with unusual care by exactly the people deciding whether to book.
About this guide
Written by the Erase Trax review team: specialists in review policy, working with businesses in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and the United Arab Emirates. Each guide is written against the platforms’ own published policies. Last reviewed .
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- We never buy, write or incentivize reviews
- The platform makes the final decision
