Glassdoor actually removed a few of the more scathing negative reviews about working there. I think Theranos advertised on Glassdoor so they removed some of the even worse reviews... there used to be some even more negative ones.
It's not a lie but it's not necessarily the whole truth. Companies can't alter reviews, but Glassdoor definitely can and does. We just don't know what criteria they use.
Glassdoor seems like it has the same business model as yelp- "Buy our advertising and we will make your good rankings rank higher and your worse reviews be filtered or lower."
Maybe not outright extortion but certainly not what they claim of being a truly independent forum.
I was looking for chimney sweeps in the DC area and found one of the top-rated chimney sweeps on Yelp on about page 4 or 5 after the 2 and 1.5 star rated companies. The companies on the first page were all those that paid Yelp. I talked to the owner of the company that I hired and he said that Yelp wanted him to pay $300+ / mo to get his placement on the search pages higher and he said he didn't want to because he was so busy from so much work he didn't need any more visibility (he ran and operated it with maybe one or two other assistants). For a lot of companies, this could be viewed as extortion to hide well-rated companies so far down the list that most users wouldn't look to go there.
Yelp definitely hides a lot of reviews that are completely legitimate supposedly due to their review validity system filtering them, but in a lot of cases I've seen the only crime these disenfranchised reviewers had was that they didn't want to go make a full-blown Yelp profile with pictures and everything to make really serious, very well described complaints. This artificially inflates review relevancy ratings for companies that have Yelp reviewers that skew towards younger demographics. There's a ton of stores where I live that are frequented primarily by 50+ year olds but they have almost zero Yelp presence since nobody operating or visiting the store are much into technology / social media enough to care.
True not not, Yelp certainly wants you to believe it helps to buy from them. It's how they make money. It doesn't need to be written in the contract to work.
I know companies that have tried to get their reviews removed or edited, and offered considerable bribes for it. All have been turned down. My impression is that Glassdoor does uphold their stated policy. It's possible that their bribes were not high enough, or not presented to the right people, but at the least, it is not easy to get a review removed.
The couple I remember reading that have been deleted were about how the CEO and the COO park their Ferraris/crazy racecar sports car in 2 designated spaces directly in the front entryway (like literally exactly in front foyer the building) whereas the actual handicapped spots were about 150 yards away down the parking lot away from the entry of the building compared to the CEO/COO spaces.
There were also complaints about ridiculously high security to the point where people didn't even know their own exact job descriptions/workflows because of "competitive secrets" and that they couldn't talk to people working in other departments due to paranoia/culture of fear.
Finally there were a couple about how they interview and act like your job will be at the fancy building on Sand Hill near Stanford but really the bulk of the employees are relegated to annexed buildings far away in EPA or in Mountain View, yet they don't tell them this until their start date - during all their onsite interviews up through the offer letter it seems like they'd be working at the HQ on Sand Hill.
