Program with FC Employees Countering Social Media Criticism of Conditions Seems to be Growing

SCDigest first reported on the Amazon Ambassadors program in 2018, under which actual fulfilment center workers took on new jobs to monitor Twitter and other social media sites to combat growing criticism of work conditions at FCs by employees and news reporters. (See Amazon Puts Fulfillment Center Workers on Social Media to Counter Critiques of Working Conditions.)

The program keeps expanding.

Supply Chain Digest Says... Interestingly, in addition to countering criticisms of working conditions at Amazon, periodically the posters criticize unions as bad for employees. What do you say? Click here to send us your comments Click here to see reader feedback

As recently reported in the New York Times (Jonah Engel Bromwich), these employees are "at once warehouse workers and public relations representatives."

It described one ambassador who went by the name of Hannah, responding to a recent on-line thread that complained about the poor treatment of Amazon's workers.

"I suffer from depression too, and at one point I wanted to quit Amazon," she wrote. "But I realized it was my fault for the problems I was dealing with, and not Amazon's. I'm allowed to talk to people, but sometimes I don't want to. Now I have some great coworkers to pass the nights with."

Yahoo Finance reporter Krystal Hu about a year ago said that Amazon told her there were at the time 14 FC ambassadors and that they were paid to patrol social media full time.

Now, Amazon will not answer questions about how many ambassadors it employs or how exactly their jobs work, the New York Times says.

However, spokesperson Lindsay Campbell it did tell the Times that "FC ambassadors are employees who work in our FCs and share facts based on personal experience," adding that "It's important that we do a good job educating people about the actual environment inside our fulfillment centers, and the FC ambassador program is a big part of that along with the FC tours we provide."

A review of Twitter posts from the Amazon Ambassador accounts suggest that workers fluidly move in and out of their social media roles.

For example, the Times says that in May a Twitter account that now uses the handle @AmazonFCBrianDJ tweeted a picture of a smiling man holding an Amazon package and announcing that, after four months in the role, this would mark the end of his Ambassador duties.

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A week later, the same Twitter account posted a picture of a different man who introduced himself as Brian D.J., who said he was an order picker at an FC in Jacksonville. But then the very next month, an account using the name Mary Kate posted that she was returning to her role as a "picker and learning Ambassador on the weekdays and modern dancer on the weekends."

The Times cites analysis from Alex Newhouse, who works for a California gaming company, who found that about 50 Twitter accounts with the naming convention "amazonfc" in their handle were also using a social media management tool called Sprinklr. Sprinklr and similar tools are common for serious social media posters.

Interestingly, in addition to countering criticisms of working conditions at Amazon, periodically the posters criticize unions as bad for employees. Amazon of course is non-union in the US but has seen occasional attempts at unionization, which remains a threat.

The Growing Amazon Twitter Army

One expert doesn't like the practice. Jonathan Albright, director of the Digital Forensics Initiative at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, told the Times that the approach could be deceptive in theory and had the potential to involve components of disinformation. He refers to the campaign as "dark art PR."

And in fact, the Times article spurred new attension on the Ambassador program,with some critics this week saying that the language used by the Ambassadors sounds robotic or scripted.

"The FC Ambassador accounts are also oddly uniform in their behavior," noted an article on the engadgent.com web site. It added that "All of the accounts are standardized with the same formatting, team members address nearly identical talking points, and they'll quickly swarm in support of one another when getting resistance or pushback."

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