This is very chaotic, but I’ve attempted some organization. I’ve also tried to include only the most interesting articles, and things that people probably haven’t already read. That’s why I haven’t shared any articles on the CJP Jantar Mantar protest, the conflict with Iran, or Pete Hegseth announcing that US troops will now be screened for low testosterone – everyone is already reading about these things. With that disclaimer, onwards with the links.
This is an interesting article published in theprint.in on how policy u-turns, resulting from each new administration reversing its predecessor’s policies, have lowered investors’ confidence in India and derailed many important projects.
Here’s the latest in the saga of ‘Rahul Gandhi is the most incompetent person to be leading Congress, and he is destroying the entire opposition through his ineptitude’ (my characterization of recent events, not the author’s). The story’s headline is “Congress hits pause on student outreach campaign as Rahul extends foreign visit, rallies postponed.”
According to the campaign schedule released by the party, rallies were slated to be held in Prayagraj (Allahabad) on 10 July, Patna on 11 July and Delhi on 14 July, before the next major mobilisation in Dehradun. However, they had to be deferred as Gandhi has extended his foreign trip and is expected to return only around 17 July. The rallies scheduled during his absence have been deferred, with no revised dates announced so far.
The Congress has not officially disclosed the purpose of Gandhi’s foreign visit.
This is bad, but I still think the prize for ‘stupidest consequence of Rahul Gandhi’s leadership and nepotism’ is that Congress’ Bihar in-charge last election was a co-founder of Shaadis.com with little experience in Bihar or managing a large campaign, whose main qualification seems to be that he was in Rahul Gandhi’s good graces (see this article and this).
A few weeks back, I was trying to answer the question “why is political violence so pervasive in Bengal?” and came across a fun fact – did you know that in 1997, in response to an Assembly question, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee stated that between 1977 (year CPIM took power) and 1996, 28,000 political murders were committed? I found this data point, and other interesting factoids in this 2010 Mainstream Weekly article. Everybody knows that Bengal political violence is bad, but the numbers are still shocking.
Also, it’s rare for me to recommend a Reddit post, but this post is a very well-researched and well-written criticism of the Kolkata hawker evictions. I thought about writing a blog post on this, but frankly, Mr. SickSilence has laid out pretty much all the arguments I could have thought of + more. I was very pleased to see that there are still intelligent people writing well-researched posts on social media – a pity more people don’t read this kind of content. Here are some interesting excerpts:
The informal sector in Kolkata essentially subsidizes the formal economy by providing cheap food, transport, and goods to the city’s workforce. If street vendors are permanently removed, the cost of survival for the urban poor and lower-middle class will skyrocket [17].
Unlike the 1996 Operation Sunshine (where hawkers eventually returned), the current drive utilizes a more aggressive, centralized enforcement model (as stated often involving the RPF and state police). This could force a massive segment of the workforce (again estimated at over 270,000 people) into destitute poverty, begging, or reverse migration to rural districts like South 24 Parganas [18].
Since hawking acts as a safety net for those who cannot find formal jobs, its removal removes the “employer of last resort,” likely increasing urban unemployment and crime rates [19].
Kolkata is historically one of India’s cheapest metros largely due to its street economy. If consumers are forced to shift from hawkers to formal retail (malls, supermarkets), the price of daily essentials (vegetables, clothes, household items) could rise by 30–50% for the average household [20].
Here is an article in TheWire.in on protests against Adani building power transmission lines through poor farmers’ land in Gujarat, rendering their land unusable and not even providing proper compensation (jantri value is well below market prices).
Gujarat government response to the protests shows just how sick their
mentality is. 1. No protests -> government will compensate below
market price at a price floor ‘jantri rate’
2. Some protest -> Okay okay, we will continue paying at an arbitrary
rate where neither the market nor the property-owners are involved,
let’s double the jantri 3. Raise hell so that MLA is afraid of losing
seat -> Okay okay, now we will pay double the market price, but you
still don’t have the option of refusing to give up the land.
The fact that they didn’t offer market value when the protests started shows that, unless they are really worried about electoral losses and bad PR, they will not give farmers basic dignity when it conflicts with their corruption. India really needs stronger legislation and/or court rulings protecting property rights, there are so many loopholes allowing the government to arbitrarily seize private property and give it to rent-seekers like Adani who aren’t even making the most productive use of it. Current laws are ambiguous and provide very little protection. (I wrote a fair bit about this actually, possibly a future blog post coming on this + related topics?)
Here is a great article in TheWire.in on Madhya Pradesh villagers (mostly Adivasis) protesting against a river interlinking project that will submerge their villages and displace their community. This is receiving very little coverage, although this project will permanently change the lives of thousands of people. I hope these people can find justice and make the government listen to their concerns. I have excerpted paragraphs from different parts to summarize the issue, although I strongly recommend reading the full article.
Right beside a river, about 15 women lie in a line on a long wooden platform, its frames wrought of bamboo and wood. The image has a certain morbidity to it: it looks like they are lying on funeral pyres, waiting to be burnt. There are several such ‘pyres’ around, with living, breathing people laying on them. Many other women and men sit, stand, even lie down in the shallow water; others stand close by, their arms tied to wooden crosses over five feet tall. Everyone gathered around have been raising a hard-hitting slogan together:
The Ken-Betwa river interlinking project, according to the government, is primarily aimed at addressing the drinking water shortage in the water-stressed Bundelkhand region, which comprises 13 districts in northern Madhya Pradesh and southern Uttar Pradesh. The project is expected to bring drinking water to about 62 lakh people, generate 103 megawatts of hydropower, 27 megawatts of solar power, and irrigate some 10.62 lakh hectares of land – every year.
People in the Chhattarpur and Panna districts are currently resisting the Ken-Betwa project for two main reasons: the project in its entirety will submerge ancestral lands, and displace people from their homes.
The construction of the Daudhan dam as part of the Ken-Betwa project is estimated to submerge eight villages. But the dam will also result in the submergence of large parts of the Panna Tiger Reserve. To compensate for this, authorities have decided to expand the Reserve. This will in turn result in 16 villages having to be relocated to another area.
An official from the Ken Betwa Link Project Authority told Frontline in 2023 that the Daudhan dam will displace 5,228 families in Chhatarpur district and 1,400 families in Panna district due to land submergence and dam-related land acquisition.
Protesters say that families displaced by the Ken-Betwa river interlinking project and its linked projects have not received fair compensation or proper rehabilitation despite losing their lands and homes.
Ecohydrologist Jagdish Krishnaswamy has told The Wire that this concept of “water-surplus” and “water-deficit” basins is itself flawed, and that no water ever goes to waste in natural systems.
At least 23 lakh trees in the Reserve will be submerged in the process. Experts told The Wire in 2021 that these forests here are a “hydrological asset” in the other-wise drought stricken land: they help sequester water, making groundwater available in the area.
Tiger biologist Raghu Chundawat had told The Wire in 2021 that the project will result in tiger habitats becoming fragmented: Panna’s tiger population will be cut off from tigers in the surrounding areas. Chundawat has called the decision to go ahead with the Ken-Betwa river interlinking project a “political” one taken ignoring numerous aspects including tiger habitat protection. He warned that Bundelkhand “will suffer for decades to come.”
On the topic of Madhya Pradesh, this article in The Indian Express is interesting: the headline is “Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Mohan Yadav’s family bought 168 acres where his government built roads.” Something smells fishy…
To wrap this up with a bit of positivity, I liked this article in TheWire.in on Punjab villages organizing community-led screenings of Satluj after it was taken down from ZEE5. This is community organization, filmmaking, and democracy at its best. Glad to see that the government’s heavy-handed suppression of free speech is not succeeding, and that Satluj is succeeding in making people talk about the important issue of staged encounters and enforced disappearances.
I also read a number of articles on wealth taxes. I won’t recommend the ones making ‘standard arguments’ for/against, since you can easily dig those up on your own, but here are some interesting articles that highlight flaws in several famous papers’ methodology.
I also quite liked this reader-submitted Washington Post article on how California’s wealth tax is bad economic policy, a threat to basic freedoms, and a massive overreach of government power that the court system will hopefully strike down.
The date, which initiative supporters say was chosen “precisely to prevent such behavioral responses,” purportedly renders it “difficult if not impossible for billionaires to leave the state, i.e., meet of [sic] the stringent rules that the California tax law uses to determine that a taxpayer has effectively left the state.” Expect to see this quote as an exhibit in future litigation over the constitutionality of the tax’s residency requirements.
Legal precedent suggests that tax changes can be retroactive, within limits. When upholding such tax changes, courts have used words like “modest” to describe the retroactive policies they affirmed. The Supreme Court has twice struck down retroactive implementation of a “wholly new tax,” distinguishing this from modifying an existing tax.
This is a great post on economicforces.xyz on why AI is unlikely to completely replace human labor. Probably one of the best articles I have read on this subject. Some arguments everyone will be familiar with:
Surgery, aviation, structural engineering, fiduciary advice, for legal reasons alone are areas where we can expect the damage from an error dwarfs the savings from cheaper production. Again, that can always change one day but not soon. When failure on one component destroys the value of all others, you don’t care about the sticker price. That’s the O-Ring logic. You care about cost per unit that actually works. When damage stakes are high enough, human-supervised production wins regardless of how cheap AI becomes.
but a lot of familiar arguments are also framed in ways that are new to me and introduced me to some interesting concepts:
When AI can do the things firms are actually buying, cheaper AI does two things at once. Firms substitute AI for workers, which reduces labor demand per unit of output. But cheaper AI also lowers output prices, output expands, and the expansion pulls labor demand back up. Whether labor demand rises or falls depends on which effect is larger. This is the Hicks-Marshall decomposition of derived demand into substitution and scale effects.
Here’s a David Oks substack post on why ambulance rides are expensive in America – definitely one of the most interesting articles I read this month. Spoiler alert: it’s a lot more complicated than the usual narrative of “American healthcare costs so much because all the corporations are too greedy!” Ambulance companies actually run very low profit margins, and the main reason for high prices is that the payment structure is all wrong. Oks does a great job explaining the history of ambulance services in America and why they cost so much nowadays, backed up with lots of examples and statistics. Here are some interesting excerpts.
From the perspective of ambulance services as option sellers, this makes no sense. It’s as if a fire insurer gave its policies away for free, and then billed the whole cost of the firehouse to whichever unlucky customer’s house happened to burn down. It’s the exact opposite of how insurance is supposed to work: but it’s what the payment structure of Medicare made necessary. The entire cost of writing the option had to be recovered from the unlucky minority of people who actually exercised it.
But because ambulance services are selling an option they can never refuse to honor, they’re required to hold idle capacity against their calls. A well-run emergency service will target utilization of about 30 to 50 percent; anything higher risks dropping a call, particularly if there’s a surge in demand.
From 1970 onward, then, the fixed cost of running an ambulance service soared. But the way people paid for ambulances didn’t change at all. Medicare had established the per-ride template in 1965, and commercial insurers universally followed it. This meant that the payment structure and the cost structure were increasingly mismatched: and so ambulance services had to pay for their round-the-clock readiness by billing for individual rides.
Here are some articles on corruption in the Trump administration:
I have also been following Trump’s attempts at changing election laws and influencing the results of the midterms in some ahem questionable ways.
This one isn’t directly Trump-related but is connected to the broader issue of election laws. From The Volokh Conspiracy: https://reason.com/volokh/2026/07/10/what-happened-to-end-citizens-united-pac-v-fec/
It’s been over two-and-a-half years since the original panel opinion, and over twenty months since the panel opinion was vacated, and the case is still not resolved.
The case in question: > The appeals court determined that the Commission’s dismissal of Complaint One was an unreviewable exercise of prosecutorial discretion. The controlling Commissioners invoked the Supreme Court’s determination in Heckler v. Chaney that agency decisions not to proceed with enforcement are presumptively unreviewable. They also discussed the time and expense an investigation would involve and noted the Commission’s substantial backlog of cases. According to the appeals court, these are all quintessential elements of prosecutorial discretion. I.e. “can courts review whether the FEC errs in choosing not to investigate something (prosecutorial discretion)?”
Big implications for campaign finance law and how elections work in the US, a bit unusual that they haven’t yet ruled on this 20 months after vacating the original decision. As that blog post put it:
Perhaps the reasons for the delay with End Citizens United PAC will become evident once the opinion is ultimately released.
This is another interesting development in “Trump vs US democracy” https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-terminates-election-assistance-commission-members-2026-07-10/: “U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday terminated the last three members of the Election Assistance Commission, the independent, federal commission that assists election administration officials nationwide, the White House confirmed.”
And, finally, it appears some White House officials have found inspiration from Indira Gandhi’s Emergency https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-officials-sought-ways-sidestep-election-agency-before-firings-sources-say-2026-07-11/
As early as last fall, White House officials reviewed a recommendation from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to declare a national emergency and create a federal task force that could compel states to address vulnerabilities in voting systems, without going through the elections commission, according to the four sources.
Here’s a fascinating WSJ article on the political consultants responsible for the disaster of Graham Platner’s vetting. Some highlights:
A thorough background check of a Senate candidate, which has become standard practice in key races, can take several weeks and cost roughly $20,000 or a monthly retainer. Moraff asked for an expedited, cheaper review to be done within days, according to people familiar with the matter.
In three days, New York-based Northside Research produced a brief, risk-assessment memo for Moraff in lieu of a detailed research book—or the start of one—that can be hundreds of pages long. The expedited product laid out risks for the campaign, flagging some of Platner’s Reddit posts as the biggest threat to his budding campaign, some of those people said. The firm, which was paid $6,250, according to federal disclosures, followed up days later with additional limited vetting. They didn’t do a candidate interview or questionnaire.
Less than two weeks later, Platner announced his bid. The expedited research didn’t discover issues that would later hurt his campaign, including the full trove of Platner’s Reddit posts or sexually explicit texts Platner sent to other women while married.
In Platner’s race, Moraff crowdsourced proposals from activists on Discord, a social-media platform, according to people familiar with the matter, who viewed it as outsourcing. A Platner campaign official disputed the characterization, saying Moraff led the development of policy proposals and used Discord as a convenient place for people to share issues they cared about.
Moraff’s policy goals are in line with those of Sanders in “fighting the oligarchy,” as the Vermont senator frequently puts it, and although he has worked in the past on criminal-justice reform issues, those who have worked with Moraff on recent campaigns say he is not as focused on policy specifics. He wants his candidates to back Medicare for All and characterize the Israel-Hamas conflict as a genocide, but beyond that, doesn’t believe voters care about detailed proposals.
This is a worrying new direction the Democratic Party is taking. Candidates need robust vetting, policy platforms should be shaped by evidence and values rather than Discord brainstorming by the most rabid segments of the party, and candidates should be chosen not just for personality and mass appeal but also for intellectual depth. The response to MAGA populism should not be socialist slopulism.
I’ve lately also been trying to answer the question “why does the government spend so much yet fix so few problems?” Spending on education and healthcare are skyrocketing, yet the returns just aren’t visible. Here are some interesting articles on that theme:
Here’s a paper I read that argues that import tariffs were not a primary driver of US economic growth in the nineteenth century, contrary to what some historians and economists claim (notably, Ha-Joon Chang – I started investigating this question mainly because I encountered this claim some years back in his book ‘23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism’). The abstract of Douglas Irwin’s paper:
Were high import tariffs somehow related to the strong U.S. economic growth during the late nineteenth century? This paper examines this frequently mentioned but controversial question and investigates the channels by which tariffs could have promoted growth during this period. The paper shows that: (i) late nineteenth century growth hinged more on population expansion and capital accumulation than on productivity growth; (ii) tariffs may have discouraged capital accumulation by raising the price of imported capital goods; (iii) productivity growth was most rapid in non-traded sectors (such as utilities and services) whose performance was not directly related to the tariff.
I set great store by Ha-Joon Chang’s version of US economic history when I was younger, but in retrospect, his analysis made little use of statistics, suffered from a confusion of correlation with causation, and failed to consider the counterfactual in which the US prospered without tariffs and primarily due to other factors like abundant natural resources, immigration, etc. He has a lot of good ideas, but I am nowadays much more skeptical of his claims about the role tariffs played in 19th century US economic growth.
On a more humorous note, this story in TheWire made me laugh: “Senior Bureaucrat Arrested in Odisha Textbook Errors Scandal, Rs 175 Crore Loss Alleged.” How badly do you have to screw up the textbook for them to arrest you haha.
This is another darkly funny story: “Floodwaters carry away 3,000 LPG cylinders in Maharashtra, videos show people rushing into river to grab them.” Perhaps the best part was this
In a statement, the Raigad district administration said anyone who comes across a cylinder should not keep it or attempt to use it. Instead, people have been asked to hand it over to HPCL, the nearest authorised HPCL distributor, or deposit it at the Tehsildar’s offices in Khalapur or Pen, or at the office of the Sub-Divisional Officer in Pen.
How delusional are they to think people will actually return those LPG cylinders? Finders keepers!
More dark humor in this story on squatters in Berkeley occupying the home of a recently-murdered university professor (at least the murder can’t be blamed on poor governance in California, since it happened in Greece). The ‘humor’ part comes from this:
On Dec. 4, 2025, a woman contacted the police to report a burglary at Jeziorski’s home. According to a press release from Stratte, the squatters reported their own burglary to establish occupancy in the house.
Tenants’ rights taken to an extreme results in the complete loss of landlords’ rights and the enabling of lawlessness. What kind of a legal system is it where thieves are incentivized to report their own burglaries because it helps them with squatting?
This is also funny: “Is There Any End to The Atlantic’s “End-ism” Fetish?”
Other things that The Atlantic has declared to be ending: “The End of Men” (July/August 2010), “The End of Diplomacy” (February 2026), The End of High-School English” (December 2022), “The End of Minimalism” (July/August 2020), “The End of Trust” (November 2021), “The End of Human Rights” (March 2026), “The End of Democracy Has Already Begun” (September 2024), “This is the Way a World Order Ends” (April 2025), “The End of Rule of Law in America” (May 2025), “How America Ends” (December 2019), “The End of the West” (November 2002), and, most hyperbolically of all, Francis Fukuyama flagging “More Proof That This Is Really the End of History” (October 2022). Only very occasionally does the thing that’s ending merit a “good riddance,” but in September 2025 The Atlantic did post a Hanna Rosin podcast under the heading, “Is This the End of Kids on Social Media?” Alas, it wasn’t, except on Facebook.
Yes, they really do have an obsession with titles involving ‘the end’ of something… living in the age of clickbait is painful.
Here is a fun article in The Atlantic on why the British economy is floundering. A bit too ‘doomer,’ as is usual with them, but nonetheless worth reading. Environmental-impact studies over 30,000 pages, a £700 million fish disco, more NHS money spent on malpractice litigation than actual obstetrics, and state pensions that rise faster than ordinary wages. Just a sample of the many bureaucratic wonders highlighted, and then of course the policy flip-flopping (e.g. old housing being demolished under one PM, and the plan to replace it being killed by the next PM), nativism, disastrous austerity measures, and Brexit’s principle of “f*ck business,” as so eloquently put by Boris Johnson. Credit to Marginal Revolution for guiding me to this article.
On the theme of ‘strange quirks of British government and economic policy,’ here’s The Guardian on the business secretary telling “UK pension funds to ‘get off their high horses’ and invest in Britain or be forced to do so by law.”
“I don’t think mandation is ideal in any circumstances. But I’ll use it if I have to, because I’m in a rush,” he said.
Speaking to the Guardian on the sidelines of an event at Lloyds Banking Group’s headquarters in London, he said he was “fed up” with being asked by the City to tweak regulations to boost investment in the UK economy, only to see a lack of investment follow government reforms.
Ah yes, step one is passing a series of laws that ruins the business environment and makes it hard for British firms to match the growth rates of American competitors, step two is refusing to fix those mistakes and then forcing pension funds to invest in assets with a lower rate of return. Academicians refer to this in the official parlance as “kicking the can down the road.”
This is also interesting: “Britain Nationalizes Its Last Major Steel Mill.” Relevant excerpts:
“British Steel is part of the fabric of our nation and a cornerstone of Britain’s industrial strength,” Mr. Starmer said in a statement on Thursday. “Today’s decision secures the future of steelmaking in the U.K., protects skilled jobs and safeguards a vital national capability.”
And some more:
Over the next year, the government sought to find a private buyer for British Steel, which requires large investments to modernize its production and reduce carbon emissions. In the end, the government failed to find a buyer and opted for nationalization.
The government said an independent valuer would be appointed to assess whether any compensation was payable to Jingye.
Nationalizing a steel mill without paying its owner any compensation is… questionable in my opinion. The nationalization can be justified in terms of the importance of steelmaking to a country’s security interests and independence, but trying to get out of paying compensation is scummy. It appears the Labor Party is channeling its inner Venezuela here.
Here’s an article that highlights serious flaws in the methodology of some of the studies claiming USAID cuts will kill millions of people by 2030. Some much-needed skepticism, and apart from the importance of casting doubt on sensationalist claims, it was cool learning a bit about statistics from this post (did not previously know about negative binomial regression). Credit to Marginal Revolution’s daily links for helping me find this article.
Here’s Noah Smith’s repost of his old article about Europeans’ opposition to air conditioning and why their current attitude is harmful to public health outcomes. Well-argued and also rather funny.
An old Slow Boring post on kritiks and how they are ruining high school debate. Well-argued, strong evidence this is a significant trend and not just isolated events, and it does a good job showing just how absurd kritiks are. For those who don’t know anything about kritiks, here’s some relevant excerpts from the post:
In a traditional debate round, students argue over a topic assigned by the tournament — for example, “The U.S. should adopt universal healthcare.” One side is expected to argue in favor of the motion (the affirmation side), and one against (the negation side). However, in recent years, many debaters have decided to flat-out ignore the assigned topic and instead hijack the round by proposing brand new (i.e., wholly unrelated to the original topic), debater-created resolutions that advocate complex social criticisms based on various theories — Marxism, anti-militarism, feminist international relations theory, neocolonialism, securitization, anthropocentrism, orientalism, racial positionality, Afro-Pessimism, disablism, queer ecology, and transfeminism. (To be clear, traditional feminism is out of fashion and seen as too essentialist.)
These critical theory arguments, known as kritiks, are usually wielded by the negation side to criticize the fundamental assumptions of their affirmation side opponents. Kritik advocates argue that the world is so systematically broken that discussing public policy proposals and reforms misses what really matters: the need to fundamentally revolutionize society in some way. For example, if the topic was “The U.S. should increase the federal minimum wage,” the affirmation side might provide some arguments supporting this policy. But then the negation side, instead of arguing that the government shouldn’t raise the minimum wage, might reject spending any time on the original resolution and counter-propose a Marxist kritik.
The author is not exaggerating – I did debate in high school, and I can confirm that kritiks really are as stupid as they sound. You can completely ignore the debate over the actual policy and just accuse the resolution of reinforcing black fungibility, and force your opponent to enter a quagmire of crypto-Marxist mumbojumbo with no bearing on the real economic or social implications of policymaking.
Fun article on why space mirrors are a bad idea, despite them having generated a fair bit of hype recently. There is a follow-up here. Nice use of common sense and basic math to debunk some very odd marketing. Also, I found it funny how irritated the author is at space mirrors:
What should one think of Reflect Orbital? There seem to be three possibilities: (1) Reflect Orbital is run by idiots. (2) Reflect Orbital is run by criminals, unethically pitching nonsensical, nonscientific schemes to a gullible audience. (3) The space-mirror solar power idea is just a hook to get money and attention for some other aim, to be announced later. The Reflect Orbital website doesn’t clarify anything, though we get more non-sequiturs meant to dazzle the ignorant, like:
I suppose it is irritating to understand something obvious but see others completely missing it.
Finally, here’s an article on how rent-seekers are filing nuisance lawsuits against small business owners by taking advantage of obscure provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the fact that small business owners don’t have as large legal teams. It’s just cheaper for the owners to settle out of court than spend much more time and money fighting a lawsuit they definitely could win, but just lack the resources to. Extortion enabled by messy regulations! The ADA is an important piece of legislation that has done a lot of good, but it’s equally important to recognize how convoluted regulations hurt small business owners and enable this kind of behavior.
There are cool videos of tornadoes here on the Twitter account of this self-described “Chinese extreme weather enthusiast especially for tornadoes and typhoons.”
And here is an interesting Twitter thread on how German laws let restaurant owners take down negative reviews by accusing them of defamation. Credit to Marginal Revolution for guiding me to this link. This is an issue I never expected to exist anywhere, but now that I’ve read about it, I’m really not surprised. Human stupidity knows no bounds. This Twitter user isn’t making it up, here’s an article that explains the issue quite well and cites sources to show this is a real problem.
The scale of review problems on Google Maps overall is staggering. Google’s 2025 Trust & Safety Report revealed that the platform blocked or removed 292 million policy-violating reviews that year, a 21% increase from 2024. Roughly 22% of all review activity on Google Maps was classified as policy-violating. That is more than one in five review attempts.
Here is the statistic that should make every consumer in Germany sit up and take notice: 99.97% of all Google Maps reviews removed for defamation across the entire 27-country European Union come from businesses based in Germany. This is not an estimate or a rough projection. It comes from Fast Company’s analysis of the EU’s DSA Transparency Database, the official European Commission database that logs content moderation decisions from platforms in near real-time. The data is as official as it gets.
The funny thing is that Google still shows you how many reviews were removed, so you can at least guess which restaurants suffer the most from rating inflation.
Well, that’s the end of this month’s link dump. Hope some of this was
interesting or pleasant reading – as always, feel free to contact me on
Discord at floofydoggo or email at chancellorceti at
gmail.com if you want to discuss something. May you live in interesting
times.