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Comment by hooande | Hacker News Reader

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

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There have also been aggressive tweets from the official "Amazon News" twitter account. It seems like this is the initiative of Bezos or some SVP who is too powerful to stop for normal company controls.

https://theintercept.com/2021/03/29/amazon-twitter-hack-unio...

> No way a company with the resources of Amazon is using several day old twitter accounts

I guess you haven't seen this tweet:

https://twitter.com/amazonnews/status/1374911222361956359

Real people work for Amazon. They can be just as stupid as the rest of us.

Spot on. It's too hamfisted to be believable - if there isn't a full team somewhere on red alert scrutinizing all outgoing media after the PR storm caused by the news tweets I'd be extremely surprised. It's too easy to get people to antagonize Amazon.

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?

To amplify the sentiment. They could pay people/organizations to take care of that. Those organizations constantly create fake accounts to change how something is perceived. Remember the Net neutrality FCC fake comments?

Er this is the company that made a tweet saying "Our workers don't piss in bottles"

You don’t even need a phone number to sign up for Twitter. Just an email account.

Unless they wanted to have evidence that they tried to do something about it (but in much smaller proportion to the accounts they let slip by)

What's not believable about that? These several day old twitter accounts with stock image profile pictures have been influencing the masses for years now on twitter. You don't need a clever deception here. People are emotional enough on issues that they never vet a source or fact check something that validates their own world view already. Making a more clever burner account would take more time and money for little benefit.

It's not that it's not believable, it's that the it's equally believable that a number of other vested parties could be doing it plausibly. You yourself just argued how low the barrier-to-entry for a campaign like this is.

In addition to Amazon itself, what if it's:

1. A huge investor in Amazon (like some hedge fund) who is doing it on amazon's behalf 2. A media outlet who wanted a scoop, so they manufactured one 3. A random 4chan troll looking for giggles 4. A foreign entity with some vested in sowing chaos into the discussion 5. A competitor of Amazon making them look bad through this easily debunked fake

I really can't believe your comment contains both of these quotes: "What's not believable about that?" and "People are emotional enough on issues that they never vet a source or fact check something that validates their own world view already"

Perhaps check yourself

It won't be the AWS team doing this on the side, it would be a commissioned company.

Good point. Haven’t considered that.

Indeed

False flag is a thing.

it could be consultants

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