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Comment by fotta | Hacker News Reader

> According to Recode, the suspicious tweets in fact came at the behest of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who had recently conveyed disappointment to Amazon officials that the company was not pushing back against criticisms that he considered misleading.

> But company personnel think Amazon’s aggressive actions on Twitter are “embarrassing.”

It's amazing how tone-deaf Bezos sounds.

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It's not surprising. The biggest danger of having tremendous wealth and/or power seems to be that you can no longer accept and integrate valid criticism from others.

There is so much criticism-- especially towards anything/anyone high profile-- including outright invalid criticism that there is potentially a selection effect: Everyone who listens to criticism gives up and we're left with people who are substantially immune to it.

Which seems to apply to some of our politicians too. Like the reply from Elizabeth Warren saying that maybe Amazon should be split up because then maybe they wouldn't have time to criticize elected officials. Or otherwise "stop criticizing me or I'll make you hurt". Not very nice coming from a political figure in a democracy.

I did find Amazon's responses to be tone deaf at best (mostly just disagreeing with them) but her reply to be much worse.

You’re clearly not being charitable to her if you read her tweet and thought she meant Amazon has to be broken up because their tweets are snarky towards her. She’s saying that Big Tech in general is so powerful—they can do whatever they want—and then snap back at politicians in snarky tweets without a care.

But they SHOULD be able to do that. So should small companies without fear of retribution.

The fact that small companies do not, out of fear of retribution by politicians is the actual problem and speaks volumes.

You’re completely missing the point I was making. It’s not about the snarky tweets. It’s about how big and powerful corporations have become.

I don’t know why I’m surprised; HN has shown me more and more that otherwise intelligent people are more than happy to support corporate friendly narratives and anti-progressive ones.

Bezos is notorious for subscribing to a kind of empathy-free "social Darwinism" going back to his days on Wall St.

there's a big difference between "hey guys Amazon isn't pushing back against criticism enough" and "lets start tweeting snarky shit at US Senators from Amazon official accounts". have a little cynicism; Recode doesn't have proof it came from Bezos or it would show it.

I am sympathetic to labor issues at amazon and other places, but a lot of tech criticism seems out of place and undue. Amazon warehouses don't seem fun (i've never done that job) but they do pay fairly well above min wage, which they deserve some credit for. If anything it validates the Senators' pushes for better wages proving it won't bankrupt businesses.

It seems obvious that amazon would want this to be the focus, instead of bottles of pee. They could be a great ally to democrat politicians pursuing changes - amazon shows they can be a trillion dollar biz with change X, amazon isn't chastised in WashingtonDC. Win-Win.

They denied it, though, instead of posting more truthfully that this is not an exceptional working condition for delivery drivers. My friend works at UPS, is a teamsters member, and said: "Every single male delivery driver ever has peed in a bottle at some point". Which makes this particular criticism of Amazon lose its sting. Instead of simply telling the truth, they decided to lie?

It's tone deaf to push back against criticisms that are misleading?

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