Weird Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Weird Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work (2018)

techcrunch.com

63 pointstareqak17 comments

Past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17831943

How amazing of a false flag op would this be? Amazon can't really be this terrible at social media.

It is actually an interesting question, the effort is so transparent that is it likely Amazon is actually behind this, or someone else is trying to make Amazon look bad to galvanize people.

The other possibility is they handed a bunch of money to a PR firm that does a bad job.

Or a PR contract somewhere with a kicker that only pays out if the union vote fails

This sounds like a possibility

Fake astroturfing can be pretty effective, IIRC a tech bro had a bunch of fake Russian twitter accounts follow a republican candidate which generated significant fake news about this candidate being helped by Russia.

How are you still doubting that this is anything but astroturfing? How can it possibly be true that "only people with a box emoji in their names are real Amazon employees", and that every single Amazon employee worth trusting has "@AmazonFC*" as their Twitter handle?

It is laughably amateurish, it's actually less believable that Amazon management and the union-busters are stupid enough to entrust this to such a sloppy operation.

> How are you still doubting that this is anything but astroturfing?

Because the accounts are so obviously fake. It seems like they're designed to be deliberately identifiable as astroturfing, rather than being genuine astroturfing. People are suggesting it's fake-astroturfing, in other words.

Obvious for you: an internet-literate, tech-adjacent, analytical, skeptical type. I appreciate your generous optimism with respect to the intended audience of these messages but I have seen sloppier attempts that have been successful enough to push the needle from one side of the other.

> Because the accounts are so obviously fake. It seems like they're designed to be deliberately identifiable as astroturfing, rather than being genuine astroturfing. People are suggesting it's fake-astroturfing, in other words.

You seem to be proceeding from an axiom that Amazon is always scary competent at everything it does, so you can infer that something that is not scary competent is not from Amazon. I don't think that axiom is true, and Amazon's perfectly capable of doing embarrassingly ham-fisted things. Especially since great success tends to breed hubris and lowered sensitivity to small failures (since your other successes mean you can fuck up and still be fine).

That's what I was thinking too. It could be fake astroturfing. I don't want to rush to conclude anything because I don't know anything for sure, but it definitely is a possibility.

I have distant family that works for Amazon and they say their warehouse in the middle of the US is full of people who love it there. That the vast majority are very happy and the rules are pretty lax as long as you do your job.

Why is is shocking that there are people who work at Amazon who are happily employed?

yes they are that terrible

https://twitter.com/amazonnews/status/1375529101931520007

It's real, but I wrote this years ago. If you read the post a former warehouse worker explains how the ambassador job actually worked.

Guessing it got reposted because of Amazon's other bad attempts at PR in recent weeks. Lots of fake FC accounts out there now too, parodies and so on, but the originals were real.

Let's be careful, "Weird Twitter" is a CIA project and while Bezos indeed has a cozy relationship with the CIA, Twitter botnets are a different issue.

(2018)

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