Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Amazon has shuttered a controversial influence campaign in which it paid workers to tweet about how much they love working at Amazon, reports The Financial Times. Employees at the retailer’s warehouses (which it calls fulfillment centers) were paid to share positive impressions about the company and to deny widely-reported workplace failings — like employees being forced to urinate in bottles in order to meet performance targets.
According to internal documents shared by The Intercept in 2021, the scheme launched in 2018 in response to waves of criticism of Amazon’s safety standards and working conditions. Workers were selected for their “great sense of humor” and told to respond “in a polite — but blunt — way” to the company’s critics,…
