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Comment by ruste | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible this is some galaxy brain plan by those promoting amazon unions to undermine amazon's credibility?

Is it possible? Yes.

It's about as plausible as you being a galaxy brain suggesting that the unions are behind the posts in order to undermine amazon's credibility, in order to undermine the union's credibility.

Who do you think has more time and money to contribute to this kind of thing? Union organizers who are already overwhelmed just trying to reach the people they're trying to help, or the company which delivers almost everything to almost everyone and made more money than most countries' GDPs?

That's a good point. Unions have never done anything shady, they're too busy feeding the poor and rescuing kittens in trees.

Snark aside, OP never said it was the union doing it. It could just be someone outside the potential union members who just supports unions in general, or doesn't support Amazon, who is doing it.

What other explanation is there? Do you think there is some die-hard Amazon supporter who goes out of their way to generate fake profiles and then post messages that wouldn't sway anyone?

Somewhere in another thread someone suggested that amazon had a program and incentives for employees to represent them positively online so maybe it is just poor PR on their part. Still, these days it's hard to take anything at face value.

Yes, that's their ambassador program. But I doubt that the ambassador program would tell the members to create unverified accounts and try to pass them off as official amazon ambassador accounts.

Essentializing all unions based on the behavior of a few of them, vs summarizing a single company's behavior who has a visible and obvious track record of breaking up unionization efforts via nefarious and underhanded tactics, are completely incomparable.

If you want snark, have some back: where did the big bad union boss touch you?

> What other explanation is there?

Hired a shoddy offshore bot-writing and astroturfing outfit who are obviously not up to the job. It's a very simple, and one of the most likely, explanations. Occam's razor comes in handy occasionally if you just take the time to think a bit.

I never said I was anti-union. I'm just pointing out that unions aren't 100% pure forces of good. They have a good idea at their heart, and frequently they are abused by insiders for personal gain.

> Occam's razor

Amazon has an ambassador program, where they basically pay workers to post on twitter about how good their job is. You're saying they have a program for workers to post on twitter, and they also hire astroturfers to make fake posts of the same thing on twitter, using photos of moderately known celebrities as their backgrounds? I don't buy it. Amazon made the mistake of creating a system where accounts are "verified" merely by a prefix of their name - "@AmazonFC...". Therefore anyone can make an account that looks like "@AmazonFC...", not just Amazon. What amazon should have done is have a single official account, or even a single official account which links to other official accounts.

Occam's razor tells me that the most likely creator of these accounts is a troll who browses reddits ABoringDystopia sub, and is just having fun.

That's also plausible, and indeed not unlikely. In that case, I applaud the tactics. Bravo! brava! anonymous internet citizen and empathetic soul!

Absolutely amazon. I take your point, but when fighting against a much larger organization this is exactly the kind of guerilla warfare tactic you'd need to come out ahead. This kind of information campaign is exactly the sort of thing that the internet makes accessible for groups of all sizes.

It could also be people behind the cause who aren't affiliated with either party. I think your point is worth noting, though I fully support the workers trying to unionize here.

The ambassador program is real but the most recent batch of tweets circulating ARE from fake accounts (as in created by third party trolls fake, not created by Amazon PR fake).

The third and most likely option is that it's trolls with too much time on their hands.

What credibility has Amazon got? (The Amazon experience is typically good for a customer, but bad for an employee. My question is in that context.)

Maybe I'm giving Amazon too much credit but I would think they would do a better job or more likely outsource this out to a group that would do a better job. And I'm on the side of the employees, hoping they unionize (effectively!).

I'd guess it's neither Amazon or pro-union employees but rather random people trying to make Amazon look bad.

I don't think you need to do a better job to get good results with twitter/internet propaganda. No one vets their sources and hardly anyone reads past the headline. The only people up in arms on this story are people who already know Amazon is a toxic environment for the worker. People who have been sipping the Bezos Koolaid aren't going to be shaken by this, because you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. It's a cheap way to amplify a message and exhaust opposition, and it works wonders as we've seen these last 5 years or so.

It's a perfectly pure distillation of Poe's Law. I honestly can't tell if it's shilling or satire.

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