PR STUNT

Amazon Abandons Employee ‘Influencer’ Scheme After It Backfires

“The ‘ambassador’ programme was always a laughable attempt to minimize the abuses unfolding inside Amazon warehouses,” said one observer.

Amazon has quietly abandoned its program of paying employees to post positive messages on social media after it backfired in multiple ways. The so-called influence campaign was created in 2018 as a PR solution to growing criticism that the company’s warehouses were unsafe and exploitative. One such tweet from a warehouse worker read, “Everything is fine, I don’t think there is anything wrong with the money I make or the way I am treated at work.” But the campaign had little reach and it was unsurprisingly co-oped by trolls who posed as Amazon workers and penned negative posts. “The ‘ambassador’ programme was always a laughable attempt to minimize the abuses unfolding inside Amazon warehouses,” said Sheheryar Kaoosji from the non-profit Warehouse Worker Resource Center. “The fact that Amazon is now trying to hide the fact that the programme ever existed shows that the company is taking yet another page out of the authoritarian playbook to guide its management.”