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'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

bbc.com

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Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#111

Post by hooande »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #104
hooande wrote: post #71

No 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

Amazon knows full well the benefits of fake reviews, and they absolutely would pay their employees to give fake reviews. As they were reported to have started doing in 2019. Their employees would likely be the ones creating cheap profiles.

If they're paying employees, why make fake accounts? Personally, as a trillion dollar entity, I would pay people to use their real accounts and give me glowing reviews. I would pay $0 for a tweet from an obviously fake account, what's the point in that?

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#112

Post by cwkoss »

brown9-2 wrote: post #4
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #2

Why is "fake" in scare quotes? The accounts are fake.

It is not really clear which type of "fake" they are - if it is non-Amazon-employees making a parody, or someone at Amazon making a not-really-existing persona: > It is unclear whether the accounts are real employees, bots or trolls pretending to be Amazon Ambassadors.

The profile pictures have visual artifacts consistent with GAN generation https://twitter.com/erikhinton/status/1376636650420203523

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#113

Post by nemo44x »

elmomle wrote: post #97
nemo44x wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Inspired by". And yeah, the conditions are far less extreme, but the dynamics of using prisoner's dilemma to reinforce order in the warehouse is deeply cruel, psychologically. Please don't argue that.

It’s giving people the option to do something else for awhile and get a small bonus on top. I had numerous jobs when I was young that had similar incentive structures if you wanted it. I doubt my managers were picking it up from Goebbles.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#114

Post by Pxtl »

skohan wrote: post #3

I 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 think that the sockpuppet problem is a manifestation of the larger crisis of truth. Look how, now that we've even better access to easily verifiable information, we still have salaried media professionals and politicians pushing lies about simple objective facts.

Whatever unwritten structures that used to prevent that kind of thing have broken down, and it's not just social media doing it. Trump was a perfect manifestation of this problem - he was able to lie about everything and everyone in the most trivially contradictable ways, but faced no consequences for that. Instead, some professional media organizations backed him up.

Only now are we finally seeing lies crest into the territory of legal action, and only with the most extreme cases - like the Dominion lawsuits.

For every smaller kind of dishonesty, it seems like there is no consequences to brazenly lying. Anybody can lie about anyone as long as it's crafted such that the victim isn't in the position to sue (particularly if the victim isn't an individual but an amorphous group, and so showing standing and damages is functionally impossible).

I mean, we've basically left it up to the social media companies like Twitter to enforce basic social contracts like "lying about a global disease in ways that encourage the spread of disease is a bad thing", and their users are bristling at that.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#116

Post by EthanHeilman »

taormina wrote: post #103
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For decades, I never thought people who kiss ass could have been serious. I was sure they were just cynically playing a game of advancement, and I despised them for it. What I've come to learn -- as disappointing as it is to me -- is that some people view this sort of thing as actual, legitimate opportunity, and are acting out of internal integrity. They don't see the hypocrisy of the power imbalance and how the comp…

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... This is a fantastic read.

As I was reading the above post, I started to remember reading an article on ribbon farm. The next response is someone posting the article I remember. The Hn bubble is real and in some cases has surprisingly low-entropy.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#117

Post by bbreier »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #85
cecida wrote: post #43

Imagine 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.

He is still the CEO. He will step down later this year.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#118

Post by BitwiseFool »

Judgmentality wrote: post #64
BitwiseFool wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The United States, where I went to school. I also want to apply some critical thinking myself and ask "why wouldn't schools have critical thinking as part of their curriculum"? Teaching critical thinking skills is not some revolutionary idea and it's not like educators want to avoid teaching people how to do it.

I never felt like critical thinking was part of the curriculum in the United States. I've always been kind of amazed how poorly it's taught if it's taught at all. Since we're just comparing anecdata at this point (or at least I am), if you have any data/studies or anything like that it would be appreciated.

To be honest I don't want to go into JStor to search for studies that support my viewpoint and lob them at you in a game of citation tennis. But, I will distill my viewpoint down as best I can and leave it at this:

People claim that critical thinking is not taught in schools because it's an easy claim to make when you perceive that so many other people are thinking uncritically. But, make a claim they disagree with and watch how good they become at it. Everyone falls into a trap of thinking that society at large lacks 'common sense' or 'critical thinking' because we all assume our worldview is true and anyone who disagrees must have deficient thinking. Ultimately I think people are taught how to think critically, but the real problem is when they choose to think critically. And that, I think, is a result of human nature, not lack of education.

Re: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter

#120

Post by fastball »

fipar wrote: post #39
mox1 wrote: post #7

Earlier 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.

Yeah, I actually think the group that is least susceptible to this is millennials, who group around the anonymity of IRC / early 4chan / etc, but before people were even pretending to use real identities on the internet.
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