Amazon's Creepy Twitter PR Army is Growing (vice.com) 21
On Wednesday, a horde of Amazon employees rushed to defend the honor of the world's richest man. From a report: The employees -- known as "FC ambassadors," for Amazon's Orwellian-sounding "fulfillment center" warehouses -- flooded into the mentions of several Twitter users. This isn't the first time these accounts have attracted attention. Earlier this year, the accounts descended on Twitter with coordinated anti-union talking points. The FC Ambassador program made its debut last August and also seemed to coordinate talking points about how great it was to work at Amazon. The program backfired most recently after a Twitter thread of FC ambassadors went viral, with many people saying the tweets were dark or dystopian (others raised doubts about their legitimacy).
When TechCrunch first covered the Amazon FC Ambassador accounts in August 2018, there were around 14 accounts. That army has grown. This week, Motherboard found more than 40 FC Ambassador accounts on Twitter which appear to be genuine. Open source intelligence collective Bellingcat did their own investigation, and found close to 60 accounts. The accounts are spread across the world, with users not just based in the U.S., but Spain, the UK, Germany, and elsewhere too.
When TechCrunch first covered the Amazon FC Ambassador accounts in August 2018, there were around 14 accounts. That army has grown. This week, Motherboard found more than 40 FC Ambassador accounts on Twitter which appear to be genuine. Open source intelligence collective Bellingcat did their own investigation, and found close to 60 accounts. The accounts are spread across the world, with users not just based in the U.S., but Spain, the UK, Germany, and elsewhere too.
Amazon, Google, Twitter, FB, etc = evil (Score:2)
Re:Amazon, Google, Twitter, FB, etc = evil (Score:4, Insightful)
The list would be TLDR.
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When some technique is no longer working due to a new law or due to actions by "users", a bug report could be filed. It would only need to be fixed once, instead of each evil player having to re-invent the wheel of evil.
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Idea: suppose that Big Evil were open sourced.
It may not be opened sourced, but I bet they share idea's. Remember the law suit years ago where the big tech firms had a behind the scenes agreement not to poach each others employee's? Who it to say there isn't some type of agreement like that with regard to how evil they can become(not in their eyes, I am sure) with regard to stealing of our privacy and selling it?
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This is almost a real thing and has been at least since the beginning of the industrial age - companies do learn from each other's mistakes, send their professionals to conferences, and settle on "industry standard" behaviors. The only thing that's really missing is a GitHub to share it all on.
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Or sourceforge, sorry whipslash ;-)
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The companies aren't evil, capitalism is.
All of these socially deleterious things are done in the name of profits. Shareholders demand gains every quarter and the value of the company is at stake if they don't meet expectations. (Remember when Google's motto was "Don't be Evil" ? That was from before they became a publicly traded company.)
Meanwhile, there are often very little in the way of repercussions for being evil; If your business is large enough, there will never be enough protestors or boycotters or
Re: Amazon, Google, Twitter, FB, etc = evil (Score:1)
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That's not a counter-example; Facebook is as evil and profit-oriented as any other publicly company. The idea that one person has veto-proof influence somehow makes the idea of profit-seeking being the root of all evil void is laughable.
The fact remains that evil is still more profitable than altruism, and that's the fundamental problem.
=Smidge=
Amazon's Orwellian-sounding "fulfillment center" (Score:3)
er, no, "order fulfillment" has long (for decades, since 1980s in manufacturing world) been standard terminology for any place that does mail order or online sales for the process of getting the product to the customer.
I'm starting to wonder if the people writing this shit have ever held a real job in the real business world.
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I mean, 100% agree that Amazon could treat employees better, and some employees probably have a terrible experience. It's not crazy either that some employees do generally have a good time, and would want to act as ambassadors (especially if that means they get paid for being on social media rather than picking).
How else are those FC workers... (Score:2)
... going to get their 30 pieces of silver... I mean, health care and benefits and employment in the face of the new and improved robotic worker armies?
Our glorious leader Jeff Bezos (Score:4, Interesting)
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Does Jeff Bezos have a site dedicated to him looking at things? [kimjongunl...things.com]
No?
Not so glorious then, is he?
Sad state of journalism today. (Score:2)
You know, instead of hypothesizing about this and linking to "witty" twitter jokes you'd think some 'journalist' could actually investigate it. Maybe try to get a hold of a few of them and actually talk to them, determine if they are real people and if they are being prompted to do this (I'm sure they are), if they believe what they're saying, if they work off of scripts, etc...
Instead we get joaks. Joaky joak jokes on twitter of the same smarmy douche with a circle picture making their little joaks. Then w
Billionaires have to find *something* to spend on (Score:2)
It must be nice to have so much money you can use some of it to hire full-time sycophants.
On the plus side - in terms of debasing oneself for money, this involves less risk of disease or arrest compared to, say, out-and-out prostitution. I wonder if it comes with health insurance?
world's richest man...not (Score:3)
Nobody gives a shit about Twitter (Score:2)
Nobody.