Review suppression

The prohibition is not on removing reviews. It is on a specific misrepresentation. Section 465.7 makes it unlawful for a business to materially misrepresent that the reviews displayed in a review section of its own site represent most or all the reviews submitted, when reviews are being withheld based on their ratings or their negative sentiment. The offence is the implied completeness, not the moderation.

Which is why the rule then writes its own way out. A review is not treated as suppressed on the basis of rating or sentiment if the criteria for withholding are applied equally to all reviews without regard to sentiment. The examples it gives are the ones you would want anyway: reviews containing trade secrets or confidential commercial information, or defamatory and harassing content. Equal treatment is the whole test. A policy that only ever gets applied to one-star reviews is not a policy.

The other half of the section covers pressure rather than deletion. It prohibits anyone using an unfounded or groundless legal threat, a physical threat, intimidation, or a public false accusation made knowing it is false or with reckless disregard for its truth, to stop a review being written or to get it removed. The Commission is clear that responding publicly is fine. You can reply, and you should watch what you say while doing it.

Then a pattern worth learning, because it runs through the whole rule. Several things sit outside it and remain risky. Organizing reviews is not suppression. Defaulting to five-star reviews first is not covered by the rule. But the Commission adds that organizing them so consumers find it difficult to know about or locate negative reviews could still be an unfair or deceptive act under Section 5 of the FTC Act. Outside this rule is not the same as permitted.