3 hours ago
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Do you have any hot takes or strong opinions about the Gulf of Mexico? Well, you’re going to have to find somewhere other than Google Maps to share them, because the platform is currently restricting users from leaving comments or reviews on the Gulf, as spotted by the BBC, following Google’s decision to play along with the Trump administration’s decision to change the body of water’s name to the Gulf of America.
The Gulf current has a 4.5-star rating on Google Maps with nearly 7,000 reviews, which is a pretty strong endorsement of the beautiful bay. But directly under the review score is a notification that says “Posting is currently turned off.” Google explains: “Some types of places are more likely to receive posts, like reviews, that violate Google’s policies. To prevent this, Google has turned off posting.”
Now, the Gulf itself does not appear all that controversial among reviewers, who describe it as “one of the most beautiful places on earth,” “a fisherman’s paradise,” and the “Best gulf ever.” But if you sort the reviews by most recent, you’ll notice that no feedback has been left on the Gulf of Mexico since a month ago. That appears to be because Google has taken it upon itself to clean up the one-star reviews that users started leaving after the company changed the bay’s label to the “Gulf of America” in accordance with President Trump’s executive order.
Users definitely did leave negative reviews once the name change took effect. You can find examples on pick your social platform of choice, and there are threads encouraging people to express their displeasure over the change on Reddit. But those started getting cleaned up pretty quickly, and now Google has decided it’s just best to prevent new reviews from going up at all. The company has also shut off the ability to suggest an edit to the location, presumably because people were suggesting it change the name back to the Gulf of Mexico.
Google can reasonably claim that this whole fiasco is just a matter of protocol, from the name change to the handling of the barrage of one-star reviews. Google pulls its location information from the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), so once the name change took effect there at the behest of Trump’s penstroke, it showed up on Google Maps. And while the negative review protest is a useful way for users to express their displeasure, Google regularly restricts posts on locations that get flooded with activity.
So yeah, it’s all just company policy in action. And sometimes company policy makes it look like you, as a corporate entity, are kowtowing to the whims of an autocrat. So it goes.
