Amazon has disbanded the Twitter military it paid to tweet about how nice Amazon is

Amazon has shuttered a controversial affect marketing campaign by which it paid employees to tweet about how a lot they love working at Amazon, reports The Financial Times. Employees on the retailer’s warehouses (which it calls success facilities) have been paid to share optimistic impressions in regards to the firm and to disclaim widely-reported office failings — like workers being pressured to urinate in bottles in an effort to meet efficiency targets.

According to inner paperwork shared by The Intercept in 2021, the scheme launched in 2018 in response to waves of criticism of Amazon’s security requirements and dealing circumstances. Workers have been chosen for his or her “great sense of humor” and informed to reply “in a polite — but blunt — way” to the corporate’s critics, together with policymakers and politicians.

In one typical tweet, an worker responds to a critic by saying: “I’ve worked at Amazon filling orders for 2 years now. Do you think if I wasn’t being paid enough that I’d still be here? Full (and generous) benefits package. OH! AND I like the people I work with! Yeah – I’m doing just fine partner! [cowboy emoji]”

The workers have been recognizable on Twitter because of the “Amazon FC Ambassador” moniker appended to the top of their names. But the precise identification or variety of “ambassadors” was by no means clear. A Bellingcat investigation discovered a minimum of 53 accounts lively on Twitter, however famous that customers tended to deploy related language, tweet the identical photos, and even swap possession of accounts, created a blur of overlapping identities.

To many, this set-up appeared too synthetic to be taken critically, and the accounts shortly grew to become a goal of criticism and mockery. This wasn’t helped by the truth that anybody might name themselves an “Amazon FC Ambassador” on Twitter, and quite a few parodies quickly appeared. As the operator of 1 fashionable parody account informed The Verge: “It was so bizarre to me that Amazon was making their employees sit on the clock and be sycophants for the people hiring them. Also, their strategy was so chaotic that this wasn’t even effective.”

This response appears to have gotten by way of to Amazon’s prime brass. As per the FT’s report, “senior Amazon executives […] were unhappy with the scheme’s poor reach,” and because of this the corporate “shut down and removed all traces of the influence campaign at the end of last year.”