One of the most fundamental principles of freedom of speech is the right to make public reviews of commercial products. In pretty much every single country where there's a right to free speech (and probably even a few that don't), product reviews are an extremely protected form of speech. It doesn't matter if they are positive or negative.
The idea behind this protection is, of course, pretty simple: It's a form of consumer protection. Consumers have the right to know what they are buying by being able to know about the experiences that others have had with the product. If there's some kind of flaw or negative aspect to a product, consumers have the right to know before buying. Sellers and manufacturers cannot be expected to reveal every single aspect of their product, so protecting the right of people to publish their own reviews is extremely important.
Which, of course, means that in most countries a company trying to sue a reviewer for giving a negative review is a completely frivolous lawsuit.
That doesn't stop some less scrupulous companies from doing it anyway. These companies are luckily a microscopic minority (and they tend to be relatively small companies), but they do exist, and whenever they do it, it usually causes a controversy.
The problem is that there is no mechanism in law that would just automatically dismiss such frivolous lawsuits from the get-go. At a very minimum some judge needs to read and review the claims of the lawsuit, and while such a judge could perhaps then immediately dismiss it as frivolous, it's not always that simple. Scummy lawyers are experts in wording lawsuits in a manner that tries to hide the fact that it's just a company trying to sue someone for a negative product review.
Thus, in many cases, the reviewer has to, at the very minimum, send a motion-to-dismiss to the court in question, and hope that the judge agrees to it. However, because the scummy lawyers are masters at making such lawsuits extremely complicated, the average person usually has no idea how to write such an MTD in the proper correct way, and would need to hire a lawyer to do it.
Even at this early stage there are several scary hurdles for many reviewers: Legal threats from the lawyers of the company, being served a lawsuit (that's usually several pages of dense legalese), and most likely having to spend money hiring a lawyer to, at a very minimum, write an MTD. In many countries, even if the MTD were to be accepted by the judge, the prospects of getting those legal feels reimbursed by that company without significant further complications and use of time are grim. Lawyers are not exactly cheap.
And, at worst, if the lawyers of that company are sleazy enough, the judge might actually not accept the MTD, and thus allow the lawsuit to proceed. Such lawsuits could drag on for months and months, with pre-trial hearings, discoveries, depositions... the whole nine yards. In fact, sleazy lawyers could deliberately start dragging out the lawsuit for as long as possible with the idea that "the procedure is the punishment", ie. intimidate the reviewer to an agreement (which, obviously, includes removing the review).
All of this does not only cost inordinate amounts of time and money (which might or might not be reimbursed by the company even if the reviewer were to win), but it's extremely stressful to the average person.
And that's exactly what those companies are counting on. They are bullies. They intimidate reviewers with threats of lawsuits and the legal procedure. And in most cases they face no repercussions for this bullying and frivolous lawsuits. (Even if once in a blue moon some reviewer goes all the way through, wins, and the company is mandated to pay his legal fees, that's usually a relatively small sum of money in the budget of that company.)
The entire system is f'ed up, and those companies are taking full advantage of it.
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