18 votes

Amazon's Twitter army was handpicked for "great sense of humor" leaked document reveals

3 comments

  1. [2]
    kfwyre
    Link
    It is presumably far cheaper for Amazon to pay a handful of employees to cultivate the image that they are doing right by their workers than it is to actually do right by their workers. The fact...

    It is presumably far cheaper for Amazon to pay a handful of employees to cultivate the image that they are doing right by their workers than it is to actually do right by their workers.

    The fact that they chose this course of action is unintentionally damning though, because it’s essentially a passive admission that they’re aware of the issues in the first place and are choosing not to solve them. You can’t play ignorant at problems that you’ve paid people to cover up.

    12 votes
    1. stu2b50
      Link Parent
      Who is the judge, though? In the Twitter fight against Congress, it's good to remember that Amazon has virtually the inverse approval rate of Congress - that is, Congress is at about a 10%...

      Who is the judge, though? In the Twitter fight against Congress, it's good to remember that Amazon has virtually the inverse approval rate of Congress - that is, Congress is at about a 10% approval rate, and Amazon has a 90% approval rate among the American people.

      Given that, so long as you provide the facade of fair working, that should be enough given that most people are predisposed to trust Amazon in the US and distrust Congress. Now, individual congresspeople like Sanders have higher approval rates, but as expected, it's highly partisan on a national level and far from Amazon's 90%.

      5 votes
  2. spit-evil-olive-tips
    Link
    Direct link to the leaked document (10 pages): https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20533967 Page 4 / 5 has some example tweets that trainees wrote (though weren't posted publicly to Twitter)...

    Direct link to the leaked document (10 pages): https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20533967

    Page 4 / 5 has some example tweets that trainees wrote (though weren't posted publicly to Twitter) in response to Bernie Sanders interviewing a former Amazon employee who described being so depressed at work he wanted to take his own life.

    The FAQ starting on page 5 (which is a common thing at Amazon in general for product launches) ends up being in this context sort of pre-written talking points to combat criticism of the program.

    7 votes