About Posting Restrictions
We aim to help people find helpful and reliable information on Maps, including through contributed content from our community of users. When we find that user contributions for certain types of places are consistently unhelpful, harmful, or off-topic, we may limit or suspend user-generated content (UGC) for those places.
Short-term restrictions
Posting may be turned off for a particular place for a short period of time to help protect the place or area from a spike in irrelevant or offensive content (for example, during a real-world event that attracts off-topic commentary on a particular place). We monitor the place and when we see the abuse attempts and the risk of policy-violating content subside, we lift the restrictions.
Long-term restrictions
Posting on a particular place may be turned off for a longer period of time if its category or geographic area has experienced a continuous pattern of low value or off-topic posts. Contributions are considered low value when they don’t typically play a large part in helping users decide whether to visit the place.
The following are characteristics of places where we may restrict UGC:
- Generally unvisitable or have limited public access. These are places where people typically don’t have a choice about which location to go to, that aren’t open to the public, or where access to the place may be limited to people who are stationed or assigned there. Examples include police stations and prisons.
- Attracts ongoing, off-topic content. These places are frequently subject to unhelpful posts like harassment, hate speech, or offensive content, rather than reviews or posts about users’ direct experiences at that location.