On September 24th there was a concerted effort to attack the reputation of our business by the Melbourne anti-vax protestors.

They convened on the 4Chan website and encouraged each other to write false negative Google reviews about Carlton Audio Visual. Amongst this incitement were also threats to our persons and to burn down our shop.

Our Google review page was rapidly hit with false reviews sponsored by this exhortation on the vax protestors 4Pleb chat page.

My response was to reply to each of them individually and consider what they were doing to a small local business. To their credit some of the reviews were subsequently taken down.

Indeed the conversations that ensued shows that some of these people are simply blokes going along for the ride, but also that some of them hold much more sophisticated far right viewpoints than the media gives them credit for.

This alt.right politic is not going to go away in Australia ...

Unfortunately, Google is very slow and reluctant to act against such attacks on the review pages.

Google reviews and the consequent rating are the make or break of a small business.

We have worked very hard at our business of Carlton Audio Visual to build a 4.8/9 Google rating and it is one of our most valued, and vulnerable, marketing assets.

We have never artificially solicited reviews, they are purely the result of nurtured customers.

This week however Carlton Audio Visual was cyber attacked by the anti vax protestors after we did a pro-vaccine anti-protester Facebook post. The post itself attracted much crazy vitriol and I was forced to pull it as the threat level expressed led to safety concerns for my colleagues. 

We customarily poke fun at politicians in our advertising and the Dan Andrews lockdown image in particular had attracted huge crazy on Facebook previously. There has been minor negative Google activity related to these, the difference this time was that it was organised from the active anti-vax anti-police group protesting this week in Melbourne.

On Facebook the advantage is that you can manage and ban hostile entries.

Not so on Google reviews.

The following people have false review ratings that remain on Carlton Audio Visual's Google review page and have undermined our hard won Google rating.

Please consider flagging them as inappropriate by clicking on the three vertical dots in the top right of each review. This will aid in the lengthy process of having Google remove them:

Mister Mistoffelees

Prion Tex

Eric Shinn

david brogla

Yarg Marger

Alexander Stanley

Jeff Shavershian

Gordon MacK

Edit saturday 23rd October : There were  20 or 30 false reviews and now there only the above 7 left, many thanks to those who have flagged them as inappropriate!

And below are just a very small sample of the "unfriendly" posts screen shot from Facebook and from the 4chan chat site where the attack was perpetrated: