Amazon ‘ambassadors’ fight criticism on Twitter
On Wednesday evening, a phalanx of Amazon employees known as “FC ambassadors” began tweeting again about how great it is to work at Amazon.
When the ambassadors see others on social media discussing the brutal working conditions at Amazon fulfillment centers, its anti-union actions or anything else unflattering about the company, they step in to offer an on-theground perspective.
They are, at once, warehouse workers and public relations representatives. One ambassador, going by the name Hannah, responded to a thread Thursday that described 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.”
Another ambassador, going by the name Rafael, responded to an accusation of being a robot.
“That would be a crazy technology to artificialize thoughts,” he wrote. “I am actually a picker inside the FC ... and was given a chance to be an ambassador here.”
The FC ambassadors were introduced in 2018 and first attracted attention about a year ago. At the time, Krystal Hu, a reporter for Yahoo Finance, said that the company told her there were 14 FC ambassadors and that they were paid to patrol social media full time. They popped up again in February, when various accounts began spouting antiunion talking points.
On Thursday, Amazon would not answer questions about how many ambassadors it employs or how exactly their jobs work.
“FC ambassadors are employees who work in our FCS and share facts based on personal experience,” said Lindsay Campbell, a spokeswoman for Amazon. “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.”
Tweets from the ambassador accounts suggest that workers shift in and out of their social media roles. In May, for instance, an account that now uses the handle Amazonfcbriandj tweeted a picture of a smiling man holding an Amazon package and announced that, after four months of tweeting, it would be his last day as an ambassador. About a week later, the account posted a picture of a different man who introduced himself as Brian D.J., an outbound picker at a fulfillment center in Jacksonville.
By using Twitter this way, Amazon is reaching out directly to a public that is more confident in the company than in its local police force, its public representatives or its religious institutions, according to a 2018 Georgetown University poll.
Jonathan Albright, the director of the Digital Forensics Initiative at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, said that the messages the accounts were spreading did not rise to the level of disinformation. He said that he preferred to refer to the campaign as “dark art PR.”