Doesn’t that also mean that ONE malicious person can get traffic off their local street or hurt a competitor’s business?

Just like moderating Lemmy, effectively policing user-generated content is a huge challenge.

I don’t think we know that yet, and I think the discovery will be interesting.

How many reports were there? Were they credible? What other sources of truth did Google consult in deciding to ignore those reports?

Google gets lots of reports and needs to filter out spam, and especially malicious reports like trying to mark a competitor’s business as closed, or trying to get less traffic in your neighborhood for selfish reasons. It wouldn’t be reasonable for Google to accept every user suggestion either.

So if Google reached out to the town and the town said the bridge is fine, then it’s not Google’s fault. If they ignored multiple credible complaints because the area was too rural to care about, that might be negligent.