I believe this article was triggered by this tweet: <a href="https://twitter.com/rulesobeyer/status/1161820065773182976?s=21" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/rulesobeyer/status/1161820065773182976?s...</a>
Whenever I see a news story about Amazon workers and robots, I'm reminded of Amazon's "workers in a cage" patent [1]. It has spawned a bunch of funny (or sad?) "Amazon Wagie Cage" memes as a result [2][3]... and even an art exhibit of a real-sized patent drawing [4].<p>Needless to say, I shop a lot less on Amazon these days and try to buy from other shops whenever possible.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-has-patented-a-system-that-would-put-workers-in-a-cage-on-top-of-a-robot/" rel="nofollow">https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-has-pate...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://i.imgur.com/QGeNley.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/QGeNley.png</a><p>[3] <a href="https://i.imgur.com/LuEpNL4.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/LuEpNL4.jpg</a><p>[4] <a href="https://i.imgur.com/EhoEHqG.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/EhoEHqG.jpg</a>
I think this article from bellingcat earlier today is better overall: <a href="https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/08/15/amazons-online-bezos-brigade-unleashed-on-twitter/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/08/15/amazons-...</a><p>Here's the list of account names using Sprinklr that was mentioned in the NYT article: <a href="https://twitter.com/AlexBNewhouse/status/1162036960027742209" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/AlexBNewhouse/status/1162036960027742209</a>
Nearly all entities in products and politics astroturf heavily. In the end it is a massive critical thinking lesson and adds much needed skepticism to the populace.<p>The truth is the internet is teaching the biggest lesson ever in critical thinking and getting your information from many sources across spectrums, individuals, companies, countries, divides and more.<p>Let's hope that people see it as a lesson and not somewhere they can bask in their confirmation bias all day, or make decisions based on fear, in those cases the populace is easy to manipulate.
There's a bit to go through here - and I agree Amazon employees are largely treated poorly (I work at amazon and lament the fact more or less daily) but this is linking to some parody accounts. Let's talk about real issues, like how Bezos could end hunger in the US and still be the richest man in the world.<p>Or keep focusing on the weird customer-antagonistic inferior chinese trash importing campaign that's been ongoing for the last few years.<p>This looks like a bunch of joke tweeters that got caught in each others' schticks.
Do we know if this is a corporate social media team, or actual employees who volunteered? Many of the accounts claim to be warehouse workers. It's rare for a major corporation to lie about something like that so blatantly.<p>I imagine that amazon employees didn't like the bad rep their company was getting for working conditions, and volunteered to respond on social media in an organized way. IF this is the case, then media organizations probably shouldn't be attacking them
There's this tweet that I find strange. One side effect of the oversold mindfulness-stoicism outlook is that people do not raise genuine concerns and instead say "the problem is within me, I just need to breathe right":<p><a href="https://twitter.com/AmazonFCHannah/status/1161910397336768512" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/AmazonFCHannah/status/116191039733676851...</a>
Companies have been doing this for at least the last 8 years, just based on my own experience working for a company that provided a solution in this space. Amazon isn’t unique or even remotely the first. They’re just using one of those social media reputation dashboards to manage complaints and support issues before they go viral online.
I don't really see the issue.<p>These appear to be real humans.<p>I see so many fake accounts, sock puppets etc. just about any place I look, that I just accept that to not be an idiot myself I need to spend time thinking through everything.<p>I don't understand writing that seems to assume that anybody, or their analysis, can be automatically believed.
I'm wondering how this even makes sense from a PR prospective.<p>Workers (?) that are paid for talking good about their employer? What's the interesting bit here?
Reading the Amazon employees’ responses in the Twitter thread made me feel physically ill.<p>It’s pure propaganda, straight out of Russia’s 2016 playbook.<p>If companies like Amazon will dominate in the future I don’t want to have kids.
I recently watched a Danish documentary about Israel, it’s a whole series on the Middle East, and one of the things they talked about in it was how Israel is never in the Danish media for anything positive. That same day I read an article about the youngest Dane to visit every country in the world, something he finished recently, talk about how there is peace and security in every country if you go to the right places. Now this is anecdotal of course, but it does seem extremely rare to see a positive story about Israel, and positive stories about minor countries around the world don’t exist. Small countries only make the news when some warlord does something horrendous, there is an outbreak of some terrible disease or climate change is sinking their country.<p>You may be wondering what my point is, but maybe the media brought this on themselves? I’m as appalled as you are by Amazon workers wearing diapers, and I personally think the way they utilise the gig-economy to avoid giving workers rights is bordering wage-slavery (I’m a socialist Dane, so I hope you’ll forgive me for that), but Amazon is a huge company and I’m betting a lot of people there are genuinely happy.<p>Imagine being those people. I work in public sector digitalisation, I think I know a thing or two about how it feels when everyone has a negative opinion on what you do. I makes you want to post like these Amazon employees, especially because onlookers almost never have a clue about actually what’s going on because the world is way too complicated to fit into a few 3-6 paragraph articles on the web.