Is this illegal? It should be illegal.
I'd rather we redesigned the internet to make sock-puppetry so difficult and costly as to make its legality irrelevant.
'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter
81–90 of 433 posts
Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Might be partially true but young people with no critical thinking skills fall for it just the same.
My feeling is that everyone falls for it. Maybe not to the same extent, but most of us probably only notice when we disagree with what’s being said.
I've definitely seen Facebook posts that appear to be weaponised alignment with one particular view I happen to agree with, but which really just seem to be there to stir up conflict and create division.
It's gotten to the point that I don't really trust anyone on Facebook in certain contexts - although I'm more likely to trust someone if their position shows some flexibility and avoids purely tribal thinking, and also if they show some evidence of background knowledge and general thoughtfulness.
I'm less likely to trust anyone whose position encourages extreme polarisation, who appears to be disguising intent, whose posts are repetitive, and who tend towards inflammatory emotive language and insinuation.
This isn't infallible and I know I've made mistakes in both directions. But I hope it's better than just getting astroturfed.
Edit: I don't think critical thinking skills help as much as they should. This isn't about assessing evidence, it's about assessing intent - which is a different problem.
Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter
#83This old TechCrunch article from 2018 ( https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/23/what-is-this-weird-twitter... ) posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26636153 has a former "Amazon Ambassador" actually explain that job: > An actual former ambassador and three year Florida warehouse veteran Chris Grantham explained it in more detail to Yahoo Finance’s Krystal Hu, who shared the information with TechCrunch: >> When I…
Wow, does that ever sound inspired by the Kapo system in Nazi camps. (edit: It was wrong of me to evoke Nazism due to its emotional connotations. I was reminded of the psychological systems of coercion that have been used all through history to efficiently keep oppressed people in line--which Amazon's actions reek of--but could have more effectively expressed my thoughts by saying "that sounds like a psychologically…
Really? Did the Nazis give their prisoners a day out of the camp and 50 Deutschmark to treat themselves with?
I don’t think it’s fair to compare this to genocide camps.
Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter
#84Imagine being worth 185 billion dollars and still obsessing about your workers advocating for better pay and conditions? What a miserable existence that must be. Bezos has always struck me as a man who cares about nothing else only his own personal wealth and success. There is no joy in his life.
how would you respond if people said you were treating your employees unfairly? financial worth has nothing to do with it. if he feels that charge is untrue, he should push back against it. I would not be nearly as measured in my response. no sir, I am not the one
> how would you respond if people said you were treating your employees unfairly?
Hopefully anyone with that level of wealth would look into fixing the actual problem instead of trying to cover it up with fake testimony. The point is, he has the money to build a working culture where people can feel like they are treated fairly, he just chooses not to
Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter
#85Imagine being worth 185 billion dollars and still obsessing about your workers advocating for better pay and conditions? What a miserable existence that must be. Bezos has always struck me as a man who cares about nothing else only his own personal wealth and success. There is no joy in his life.
Equating every action of a million person company with their (soon to be former) CEO is disingenuous. Jeff Bezos isn't personally directly every action of every employee at Amazon. I know it's popular to hate Amazon, but we don't even have any evidence that this handful of Twitter accounts was created by Amazon employees in the first place, let alone personally directed by Jeff Bezos.
Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter
#86No way a company with the resources of Amazon is using several day old twitter accounts with first google result profile pictures. This is the equivalent of someone spray painting "We hate workers! signed, Amazon" on a wall I don't think even twitter can verify who made those accounts because it's so easy to vpn and use google voice numbers. You can choose what to believe, though
You don’t even need a phone number to sign up for Twitter. Just an email account.
Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter
#87Some bots producing fake reviews on Amazon are just too funny to write off.
My favorite (https://www.amazon.com/Evaluation-Astroskin-Behavioral-Self-...):
"Wow!!!!! this product exceeded all my expectations. When I travel through space, I have always wished there was a way to measure my vital signs without bulky hardware and uncomfortable wires! Arun's project report taught me everything I needed to know about the benefits and limitations of astroskin! Now I can purchase this system for myself and my crew with confidence that I did not have before. I highly recommend this report to anyone wanting to measure their blood pressure in space or other extremely harsh environments."
The product is being sold for $169.43 on Amazon, and is actually a PDF available for free via NASA.gov. See: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20150021842/downloads/20...
As for the peeing in bottles thing, Amazon is not that smart. There are people that look completely normal, that experience life-threatening autonomic dysreflexia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_dysreflexia) from having to hold their bladder, even if it is just for seconds, like me. Perhaps I should try working in a US Amazon warehouse. It would be perfect lawsuit material and the ultimate power play against their inhumane policies around toileting breaks.
Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter
#88Does anyone else think that Amazon news handle is doing damage to their brand? Silence seems like a better strategy. they must view this union vote as the beginning of the end.
Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter
#89I feel like authenticity of online communication is an unsolved problem. The web was supposed to be a democratizing platform: all you need to communicate with the world is an ISP and a keyboard. But if there's no way to control for authenticity, online sentiment will just be an arms race for who can pay for the best astroturfing.
> I feel like authenticity of online communication is an unsolved problem
Someone else pointed out Voice.com in this space, which at least is trying to do it. Although if you read the fine print, the seem to require you to send them a "selfie", I'm not sure how that solves anything.
Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and if you are somewhat tech savvy OR "grew up" on the internet (say 40 and younger) you understand this. The problem is previous generations who don't really understand this. Perhaps one angle to tackle the problem is to educate the group(s) of people who continue to believe whatever they read on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
I agree on the need to educate people, but disagree on the age group criteria. I've met enough people under 40 who believe whatever they read online, especially if it confirms their existing set of beliefs.
I've found this very disturbing, the generation I grew up in might be the most tech literate but I think that's a false impression due to the friends that I've chosen. When I joined a guild in an MMO and got to see some truly random folks from other walks of life that was a fair bit eye opening.
My concern about younger folks is that the world is shrinking as large corporations try and squeeze as much revenue as possible out of markets - the movement of Apple to lock down the app store and force people into safe walled gardens just so they can control the revenue stream might be one of the worst blows of tech literacy of the modern world. Instead of young folks getting devices and struggling with malware and hacking at programs to make them do what they want. They're growing up in a sterile environment full only of buttons: this button causes "A" to appear on the screen and this button plays a movie. God forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get "A" to appear over the movie - doing that is hacking and very naughty so you should never do it.
I remember programming solitaire for an introductory java programming course in uni and hacking a BufferedImage to force some cards to be overlaid by writing in the different card images at different offsets that is not the right way to do that but it works - we need to make sure that new generations are brought up empowered to hack things in creative ways.