Working Conditions: Fake Amazon Ambassadors Trolled On Twitter

Apparently, you have to take everything you read on social media with a pinch of salt.  Amazon workers speaking highly of their working conditions have been baited on twitter and accused of lying.  

About two weeks ago, Facebook came under fire for allowing pages who sold counterfeit reviews on amazon to thrive. Today, desperate retailers are not buying fake reviews. Amazon is under fire on Twitter for paying its employees to lie.

Twitter users are pointing out obvious inaccuracies and robotic or scripted language as evidence that employees are paid to tell the lies on social media in the guise that they are Amazon Ambassadors.

Amazon told BBC news that the Ambassadors are employees who post their personal experiences on social media. It didn’t say if they carried out the task for a fee.

“Fulfilment centre (FC) ambassadors are employees who work in our FCs and share facts based on their personal experience. It’s important that we do a good job educating people about the actual environment inside our fulfilment centres, and the FC ambassador program is a big part of that, along with the FC tours we provide.”

Twitter users think the tweets are scripted because Amazon has faced criticism for having poor working practices. In fact, thousands of workers staged a protest about the poor pay and conditions on Prime Day, a day for special offers for subscribers. Workers at Amazon accused the company of treating the staff members like machines or robots.  They were expected to work at an incredible speed, which could be mentally and physically exhausting.

It’s therefore not out of place for twitter users to not think that the tweets praising the supposed “awesome working conditions” are not scripted. These ambassadors praise working conditions and also defends the company with so much energy.  “Every single tweet by one of those Amazon FC Ambassadors has the exact same energy as someone answering the door with a gun to their head, and telling the cops that everything is fine,” a critic said.

Amazon changed the name of its warehouses to fulfilment centres and launched the ambassador programme. It was a massive launch; it invited the public to visit the centres. While it claimed that the centres were built to educate the public about retailing opportunities, critics argued that the whole idea was to rebrand and improve the company’s dented public image.