Review censorship on the big travel websites: Any analyses/research?

For Yelp, there recently was a lawsuit about them charging businesses for removing bad reviews: Yelp extortion - note that the lawsuit was not about the practice itself, but how it did it (lying about the cost and kept demanding money).

I think you can always learn something from even good reviews (what do they NOT say), but take anything with some common sense and a grain of salt.

Accounts with only one or two reviews are suspicious, whether their reviews are favorable (sockpuppets of the owners?) or negative (spite? competitors?). A computerized algorithm probably found a large number of negative reviews from multiple users at the same IP address. They may have been deleted without any human intervention, that's such a red flag. (I have worked on such algorithms but not for travel reviews.)

A much more interesting experiment is building up a serious reputation of many reviews. I doubt if any review you make will be questioned in that case.

I should add, I recently wrote Trip Advisor because a mid-range hotel in NYC had a large number of 5-star reviews where that was the user's only review or one of two. Once upon a time, such inquiries to customer service got human response, but no longer.

In most cases it's not the platform itself that removes your review, but most likely the business that gets a bad review.

If you open a business account on those sites for your guesthouse, restaurant etc. you get a login to update your details, pictures and also comment on customer feedback, or moderate (delete) certain comments.

Apparently trip advisor has issues with fake reviews, where businesses either buy themself good reviews to look better, or they post on competing hotels and claim that their business or staff is terrible and recommend a competing business in the same city somewhere in the review.