[HN Gopher] 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter
___________________________________________________________________
'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter
Author : alexrustic
Score : 657 points
Date : 2021-03-30 15:48 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| _wldu wrote:
| Par for the course.
| 4684499 wrote:
| > It is unclear whether the accounts are real employees, bots or
| trolls pretending to be Amazon Ambassadors.
|
| Personally I would wait for more evidence to judge (which seems
| unlikely to happen). It's not so hard to operate a false flag on
| platforms like Twitter.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Twitter just masquarades as legitimate communication, but more
| than half ot is is fake, bots, trolls, 'influencers' and psycos.
|
| How does civilised society survive if 90% of our communication go
| online to platforms like this?
|
| This cannot continue, there must be real consequences for
| puposeful mass deception.
|
| I have recently gone through some of my old tweets where I
| replied (respectfully) to some climate deniers and fairly far
| right-wing accounts. All those posts are now deleted or the
| accounts have been closed. Where they all fake bot accounts? Who
| did I reply to? Did it even matter?
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| a similar article was up yesterday. I only think it's a problem
| (edit: the ethics are another story..) if these accounts aren't
| upfront about being employed by Amazon to do such work. The
| impression i got from reading yesterdays article is that this is
| not the case.
| mouzogu wrote:
| wow, I love Amazon for the convenience they've brought to my life
| but this is about as slimy as it gets...
| hooande wrote:
| 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
| heckerhut wrote:
| Good point. Haven't considered that.
| chacha2 wrote:
| It won't be the AWS team doing this on the side, it would be a
| commissioned company.
| nautilus12 wrote:
| 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)
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| You don't even need a phone number to sign up for Twitter. Just
| an email account.
| qvrjuec wrote:
| 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.
| asdff wrote:
| 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.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| 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.
| hooande wrote:
| 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?
| tartoran wrote:
| 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?
| cwkoss wrote:
| 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...
| adam12 wrote:
| > 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.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Er this is the company that made a tweet saying "Our workers
| don't piss in bottles"
| tcrow wrote:
| This is a problem the Voice.com social platform is attempting to
| tackle, read more about it here: https://about.voice.com/learn-
| more/. I'm not affiliated with Voice in anyway, just someone who
| is eagerly awaiting open registration.
| Kiro wrote:
| Clicked on logo, came to an extremely laggy game where I got
| Game Over after a couple of seconds. No idea what's going on.
| tcrow wrote:
| Ha, cool find! I dunno tho, seems to run well for me.
| cecida wrote:
| Meh, social network mixed up with some sort of cryptocurrency
| bullshit. Hard pass from me.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| It's funny how the ups and downs of evaluating a startup go:
|
| Phase 1: "Okay, it's a Real Names social network, seems
| probably fine."
|
| Phase 2: "Oh no, some sort of token economy. Well, maybe it--"
|
| Phase 3: "Nevermind, it said the word 'blockchain,' abandon
| ship, this is doomed."
| heckerhut wrote:
| Well you could've guessed 3 when reading 2.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| No, I assumed they'd just store your "points" in a Users
| table in a relational database, plus a "transactions" table
| somewhere for history. Going with a blockchain solution is
| kind of crazy unless you're a blockchain company searching
| for a use case for your ridiculous--wait, what's this
| "Copyright (c) 2021 Block.one" bit at the bottom of their
| page?
| kleer001 wrote:
| Interesting idea. Nothing to stop people being paid to voice
| another person's or company opinion though.
| tcrow wrote:
| You're right, technically there is nothing to prevent that
| from happening, but I think the idea is that you only get one
| "Voice", so if you want to align it to something you don't
| necessarily believe in for the sake of money, then you will
| have to suffer the consequences of that. Might be a good way
| to thwart paid attempts at spinning undeserved corporate-
| positive narratives.
| beshrkayali wrote:
| There are plenty of reason to hate Amazon and their policies, but
| this doesn't seem like something they'd actually do. More like an
| amateur anti-Amazon activist stunt to make them look bad.
| cecida wrote:
| Imagine being worth 185 billion dollars and still obsessing about
| your workers advocating for better pay and conditions?
|
| What a miserable existence that must be. Bezos has always struck
| me as a man who cares about nothing else only his own personal
| wealth and success.
|
| There is no joy in his life.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Imagine building a company from the ground up that is
| succesfull solely because it produces a lot of value to people,
| and yet random people on the internet still think all you care
| about is hoarding money and think they can make better
| decisions than you.
|
| Here is the summary of the issue.
|
| Firstly, pre-pandemic, unemployment was at an alltime low (and
| its trending that way to as places are reopening), very close
| to frictional unemployment rates, while Amazon was still able
| to roll out things like 2 day deliver and same day delivery.
| This means that it was able to staff accordingly. This in turn
| means that the pay that people recieve is worth whatever the
| working conditions are, and people can quit and go find easier
| job at any time. This is also true of people that are able to
| work overtime, for double the pay $30 an hour. Not to mention
| that benefits are also included, which as far as health
| insurance is a big plus for people.
|
| Secondly, the number of reports of poor working conditions are
| far and few in between. For the scale of amazon, its expected
| that some warehouses are going to be run poorly. There isn't a
| single shred of credible evidence that this is a widespread
| problem. Also, with unskilled manual labor, there are people
| that are going to have a harder time than others. Taller
| pickers for example, have an advantage over shorter pickers
| that don't have to use the step stool. But again, 3%
| unemployment rate.
|
| As far as unionization goes, this is the general gist of it. If
| the workers unionize, the service capability will undoutably go
| down. When workers realize they can take it easy and keep their
| jobs, productivity will go down. While its true that worker
| conditions will improve, the problem is along will come Walmart
| thats not as much in the spotlight, and offer better service
| and shipping while having shit working conditions, and people
| will just switch over because thats more beneficial to them. In
| no way shape or form the will continue supporting Amazon just
| because their workers unionized, out of the "good of their
| heart".
|
| So Bezos is doing the correct thing by being anti union.
| Unionization is messing with the free market, which never leads
| to good outcomes historically.
|
| If you care about the lower income people, then go out and vote
| for politicains that support higher taxation for the rich,
| social programs for the poor, so that ones living condition
| does not depend on ones job.
|
| Also, for your brain health, get of the domapine fix that is
| the outrage of the internet lefism.
| owl_troupe wrote:
| Writing off legitimate complaints about working conditions at
| Amazon-which are, in fact, widespread-as "outrage of internet
| leftism" is dismissive and plain incorrect. [1]
|
| By what definition of "free market" is unionization fairly
| characterized as "messing with" said market? Isn't the idea
| of the free market that actors within that market have the
| opportunity to use resources and organize resources the way
| they see fit? It seems your definition of "free market" only
| permits corporations latitude in making meaningful choices,
| but employees and consumers none whatsoever.
|
| [1]
| https://www.nlrb.gov/search/case/AMAZON.COM%20SERVICES%20LLC
| ActorNightly wrote:
| >is dismissive and plain incorrect
|
| If you are going to post any proof, at least read the stuff
| that you posted. 16 cases of complaints with extremely
| vague information in them is hardly proof.
|
| Don't bother looking for actual evidence though, because
| you won't find it.
| owl_troupe wrote:
| We could look at one of the cases cited there:
|
| >A National Labor Review Board (NLRB) investigation has
| now found that Amazon illegally interrogated and
| threatened Jonathan Bailey, a lead organizer of the
| Queens Amazon walkouts, and has issued a federal
| complaint against Amazon, according to official NLRB
| documents...
|
| >The case was settled before it went to trial, but the
| issuing of the complaint means that an NLRB investigation
| found Amazon broke the law.[1]
|
| Perhaps we could look at another:
|
| >Last month, the National Labor Relations Board issued a
| complaint in Bowden's case, meaning the agency found
| merit in her allegations that Amazon threatened,
| suspended, and ultimately terminated her because she had
| been talking with coworkers at an Amazon warehouse in
| King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, about pay and other
| workplace issues, which is a legally protected
| activity.[2]
|
| Then of course, there is the article that is the subject
| of this post. Call it speculation, but a corporate
| astroturfing campaign is not a convincing indication
| Amazon is on the right side of morality, law, or the
| facts here.
|
| [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy8ngk/amazon-
| interrogated-w...
|
| [2] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan
| /amazon...
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| > Unionization is messing with the free market, which never
| leads to good outcomes historically
|
| I think the 8 hour week, and ending child labour are good
| outcomes.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Non sequitor. Saying that unions were reponsible for those
| things so they are good is the same thing as saying that
| Nazis are good because a lot of medicine research and
| breakthroughs happened under their regimes.
| o_p wrote:
| If it was for market alone those issues would never been
| fixed, full free market is just bad for labor market
| because of the power asymmetry between supply and demand.
| gjulianm wrote:
| > This in turn means that the pay that people recieve is
| worth whatever the working conditions are, and people can
| quit and go find easier job at any time.
|
| Sounds easy but I assume it isn't so much. Applying regular
| market rules to the job market is misguided. First, people
| _need_ a job to live. If all available offers are starvation
| wages, people can 't just say "well I won't work for this".
| Second, changing job is a big risk regarding healthcare and
| job security. Some people might prefer lower pay but higher
| stability rather than slightly higher pay but with a high
| risk of being fired. Third, different people have different
| jobs available. For unskilled labor there will always be more
| people than jobs, and there will always be people that need a
| job _now_ doing _whatever_ so they don 't lose their home.
| That will push wages down even in an environment of low
| unemployment.
|
| > Secondly, the number of reports of poor working conditions
| are far and few in between.
|
| There are quite a lot of reports in multiple countries and
| outlets. Taking into account that it's not easy for workers
| to put their story out there and that they take a risk by
| doing so, I wouldn't dismiss the evidence so quickly.
|
| > When workers realize they can take it easy and keep their
| jobs, productivity will go down.
|
| Or go up. Evidence is mixed and depends on the setting. It's
| not "undoubtely".
|
| > While its true that worker conditions will improve, the
| problem is along will come Walmart thats not as much in the
| spotlight, and offer better service and shipping while having
| shit working conditions,
|
| Walmart employees could make an union too.
|
| > Unionization is messing with the free market, which never
| leads to good outcomes historically.
|
| Things unions have historically done (some of them haven't
| reached yet the US precisely because of the lack of
| unionization):
|
| - Limit weekly working hours. - Weekends - Paid vacations. -
| Protect workers in bad situations (pregnancy, disability,
| injuries).
|
| That's just in general. Go into actual unions and see what
| things they do.
|
| Also, they're not messing with the free market. The job
| market is not a free market, there's an extreme asymmetry of
| power and information between a worker and a company. Most
| workers can't afford to lose their jobs, most companies can
| afford to lose a worker. By splitting workers they can apply
| individual pressure to gain an advantage that they couldn't
| get if workers actually coordinated. Unions restore the power
| balance and give workers the power to negotiate the
| conditions in an equal setting.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| The free market dynamics you explained force the squeezing of
| margin which in turn squeezes time and energy from humans
| with a eventual race to the bottom to share that margin with
| shareholders. There are plenty of companies who decided to
| intervene and have learned to compete while balancing the
| interest of their workers, customers, and shareholders.
| Amazon is not one of these. The business model and Amazon's
| key value of always thinking of the customer first will
| prevent the model from also considering the employee.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| The labor market has monopsony power. Unions are the only way
| for labor to negotiate on even grounds, fixing the market
| failure.
| james4k wrote:
| Unionization is a correction of the market if anything, as
| labor has a buyer's market. Both by the immediate need of
| survival by the seller, and a similarly high rate of
| exploitation at competing jobs that limits real choices. And
| arguably an actual monopsony/oligopsony, but that's besides
| the point.
|
| Edit: It's an interesting admission when you basically say
| that Amazon's worker productivity depends on coercion.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| >Unionization is a correction of the market if anything,
|
| Nope. Injecting money into lower end income levels, through
| things like raising the minimum wage to $10-11, or social
| welfare programs, causes every company paying minimum wage
| to slightly bump up their salaries - thats a market
| correction.
|
| Unionization is economically equivalent to rent control,
| which is not a market correction.
|
| The reason why rent control doesn't work is you basically
| people who cannot otherwise afford to live in an area, and
| artificially increase their net worth. Of course they want
| to stay in the area, which decreases availalbe housing
| supply, prevents building of new housing supply, e.t.c and
| so on with cascading effects.
|
| With unions is the same thing. People who are not worth $15
| an hour because are slow are artificially inflated, and now
| they get put into a job that is hard to fire from, which
| then in turn leads to companies less likely to hire people,
| which decreases labor supply, and has other cascading
| effects.
|
| >It's an interesting admission when you basically say that
| Amazon's worker productivity depends on coercion.
|
| As is the case for any non-protected unskilled labor
| position, of which there are plenty. Amazon perhaps does
| more metric collection and expects a higher throughput, but
| they also pay accordingly. And people don't have to work at
| Amazon if they don't want to.
|
| Its interesting though that people chose to focus on Amazon
| when talking about this, instead of all the companies that
| share similar working conditions. Kinda shows you where
| your priorities are, which is not in discussion of things
| that could benefit the lower income class.
| james4k wrote:
| Amazon is in the spotlight right now because of their
| very loud anti-union efforts and being the second largest
| employer in the US. Excluding the Department of Defense,
| but that's a digression.
|
| You're right that Walmart should be in the overall
| discussion, but they aren't the ones in a unionization
| vote happening at this very moment.
|
| And it's weird to conveniently act like the discussion of
| issues that benefit low income workers haven't been core
| political topics, like the $15 minimum wage you keep
| bringing up.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| Correct. Unionization is a product of the free market,
| where suppliers collaborate together to increase their
| selling power.
| jtdev wrote:
| I would love to hear you define what you mean by this
| statement regarding Amazon: "produces a lot of value to
| people"
|
| Just selling cheap shit with no regard for those who produce
| and deliver your products doesn't equate to "produce a lot of
| value to people"...
| jmeister wrote:
| Great comment.
|
| Free market efficiency + redistribution via taxes+coupons is
| the way to go.
|
| Milton Friedman approves.
| marricks wrote:
| Amazon warehouses have a far, far, higher turn over rate than
| other warehouses, probably because the conditions are so
| cruel.
|
| It's really sad how many people get super invested in
| defending mega corporations. I hope it's just employees
| trying to move up but you never know.
|
| https://labor411.org/411-blog/warehouse-worker-turnover-
| rate...
| ActorNightly wrote:
| >Amazon warehouses have a far, far, higher turn over rate
| than other warehouses
|
| True
|
| >probably because the conditions are so cruel.
|
| Ugh, thats the crap I am talking about in the last sentence
| of my original post.
|
| There is nothing wrong with high turnover at a minimum wage
| manual labor job. Amazon hires seasonal workers that
| happily work overtime for $30 and then quit. Nobody is
| making a career out of being a warehouse associate.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| Why do you assume it's people leaving because of cruel
| conditions and not people being fired, especially given
| that they're open about firing lots of people and
| encouraging many to quit? They don't hide the ball on that.
| marricks wrote:
| Do they create high turn over because they're selecting
| for the best people to exploit?
|
| It's a gestalt, you can see it two ways and I have no
| clue why someone would want to see it as a "good
| practice" unless that view was beneficial to their job
| and career advancement.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Exploit is a loaded word. Employment is fully at will.
| And again, 3% unemployment rate.
| james4k wrote:
| "At will" is incredibly loaded. Employment is necessary
| for survival.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| Because they have calculated that turnover is more
| profitable than the cost of quality recruiting, training
| and on boarding. Firing people is super costly. The math
| of the churn and burn model is working.
| scubbo wrote:
| > Unionization is messing with the free market, which never
| leads to good outcomes historically
|
| There are definitely some true, fair, and pertinent points in
| your comment (though, to be clear, they're not strong enough
| to actually make a compelling point, and I still disagree
| with your conclusion and position), but this is just
| nonsense. Every single social welfare program is "messing
| with the free market", and while I do concede that some of
| them have been failures and some have been inefficient, they
| are overall a net positive to _human quality of life_, even
| while they may reduce a business' productivity.
|
| If you modified your statement to "which never leads to good
| outcomes for a particular company", or even "for the
| economy", then it would be a truer statement - but it is
| possible for a company or for the overall economy to take a
| small hit, while actual real humans (who are, after all, the
| ones that we should care about) enjoy a far greater quality
| of life.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| >Every single social welfare program is "messing with the
| free market"
|
| I mean, saying that a human life is worth something so you
| can't just treat people as expendable labor is "messing
| with the free market" technically, but thats a very low
| boundary. Social welfare addresses the lower tiers of
| income, specifically to aid people in basic needs of
| housing, food, healthcare and education. Those people
| aren't putting any significant money into the economy.
|
| Unionization on the other hand is selective inflation of
| labor value in certain areas. Thats definitely messing with
| the free market. Didn't work for France very well, not
| going to work for US.
| scubbo wrote:
| And where do you suppose that the money to fund those
| social welfare programs comes from? Not the free market,
| that's for sure.
| throwyetanother wrote:
| >So Bezos is doing the correct thing by being anti union.
| Unionization is messing with the free market, which never
| leads to good outcomes historically.
|
| Tell that to Sweden, with its 80% unionization rate and
| productivity (GDP per hour worked) at 97% of that of the
| United States.
|
| And since you said "historically" - it's not a recent change
| of affairs. In the 1970s Sweden's productivity (GDP per hour)
| was 90% of that of the United States.
|
| Feel free to compare other European nations:
|
| https://www.nationmaster.com/country-
| info/stats/Labor/Trade-... https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/gdp-
| per-hour-worked.htm
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Looking at a narrow metric like GPD/hour as support of
| unionzation is very selective.
|
| Sweeden also has more homeless people per capita than US,
| and higher unemployment, and lower GDP/capita, and
| different labor laws.
|
| Its also not really a good excersize to compare against
| other countries. With full analysis, you quickly get into
| weeds of things like cultural values, homogeneity,
| hysteresis in policy, all of which affect the economy.
|
| Saying that an economic policy works in one country has no
| relation to whether it works in another. For example
| (albeit a dumb one, but it illustrates the point) - in most
| of EU, there aren't really 24 hour grocery stores or food
| places, unlike in US. Is it better to enact a policy stop
| economic trade in late hours, with the assumption that
| people are more productive if they have time with their
| families, or would you rather have a free market that
| allows the night owls to make money if they want to?
|
| The answer is that it solely depends on the population.
| General labor class with more traditional values would
| probably prefer the former. Younger techies that aren't
| concerned with families and love what they do and willingly
| work into later hours would prefer the latter. E.t.c and so
| on.
| barrenko wrote:
| Things work differently at different scales.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| yes, they might work even better atthe scale of US
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _Unionization is messing with the free market_
|
| Your conception of what "free market" means is wrong, and the
| thing you're imagining has never existed.
|
| Anyway, here's a few other things that mess with "the free
| market" as much as unionization:
|
| - Workplace safety laws
|
| - Environmental protection laws
|
| - Minimum wage laws
|
| - Accounting regulations
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Hmm its almost like goverment regulations that apply to ALL
| companies are somehow different than selectively unionizing
| the labor force of a certain company or sector.
|
| Where are all the comments about Walmart unionization?
| [deleted]
| moate wrote:
| The idea that "workers can't band together to make demands"
| somehow is in opposition to "market forces" and not ITSELF
| a market force is how we got into this mess in the first
| place.
|
| It's like saying "people are boycotting _product x_ because
| they disagree with _company policy_ " isn't allowed because
| "cancel culture is messing with the free market".
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Unionization is by far more than "workers banding
| together to make demands".
|
| Unions have things like the ability to force someone to
| join a union and pay dues. From the point of view of the
| union, you ofcourse want that in order to stop the union
| from loosing power to non union members.
|
| And also, if you think that unions are market forces
| because they represent the interest of workesrs, so are
| anti union measures because they represet the interests
| of companies, so by definition you should be ok with what
| Amazon is doing.
| [deleted]
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _by definition you should be ok with what Amazon is
| doing._
|
| Only if we're on the side of definitions, I guess.
| deanCommie wrote:
| Fuck dude, why did you have to ruin your whole post with your
| last sentence?
|
| You can make a good argument without devolving into "us-vs-
| them" tribalism.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Its us-vs-them all the way when it comes to disinformation
| and shitting up the internet more. I don't care where your
| personal beliefs are, the issue is that this brand of
| online wokness is so widespread its taking over everything,
| with plenty of misinformation to go about.
|
| For example, Im big into mountain biking, and here is a
| recent example of this (read the comments)
|
| https://www.pinkbike.com/u/jamessmurthwaite/blog/slack-
| rando...
| WC3w6pXxgGd wrote:
| Because it's an accurate sentence?
| nwienert wrote:
| > Walmart [will] offer better service and shipping while
| having shit working conditions
|
| Wait so, should the unionize too? Or were they not fully
| staffed during the record low employment before?
|
| One of these must be true, or you are making incompatible
| claims.
| evanlivingston wrote:
| Sorry, is unionization of workers not an element of a free
| market?
| alienthrowaway wrote:
| > What a miserable existence that must be. Bezos has always
| struck me as a man who cares about nothing else only his own
| personal wealth and success.
|
| On the contrary, he is probably very happy with the way things
| are. You may be buying into the "Just World fallacy"; there are
| plenty of people you may find despicable who are leading happy,
| fulfilling lives, by their standards.
|
| I think the antipathy towards workers a combination of 2
| things: it takes a fair amount of conceit/self-belief to dare
| think you can change the world (statistically speaking). The
| second thing is, even if you didn't start of with that mindset,
| success usually brings a certain post-hoc justification in the
| vein of "Clearly, I have been successful, therefore I'm better
| than most", which easily morphs into "My needs are more
| important; the little people are too focused on short-term
| goals and yet I have to compete with them for the same
| resources to achieve _even more important goals_ I have planned
| ". As someone from a low-income background, I have noticed that
| the more successful I have been, the less empathy I have, and
| I'm only middle-class. I don't know if it's because of my
| increasing income, increasing age, or combination of both.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Equating every action of a million person company with their
| (soon to be former) CEO is disingenuous. Jeff Bezos isn't
| personally directly every action of every employee at Amazon. I
| know it's popular to hate Amazon, but we don't even have any
| evidence that this handful of Twitter accounts was created by
| Amazon employees in the first place, let alone personally
| directed by Jeff Bezos.
| bbreier wrote:
| He is still the CEO. He will step down later this year.
| lm28469 wrote:
| He wasn't "former" CEO for the last 26 years though, talking
| about being disingenuous
| bitcharmer wrote:
| It was under his reign that this toxic workplace culture was
| created. It's 100% his doing.
| coldcode wrote:
| Former CEO my foot, he is just as in charge as ever; nothing
| happens without his approval.
| dylan604 wrote:
| There are news articles floating around now saying that
| Bezos was a direct influence on the recent aggressive
| nature of Amazon twitter accounts attacking/fighting back.
| Not sure how many former employees would be able to wield
| that kind of power. Granted this former CEO is still the
| President of the Board or whatever Grand Poobah title he
| has.
| WalterSear wrote:
| He did this.
|
| https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/3/28/22354604/amazon-
| twitter...
| Jasper_ wrote:
| News articles have came out saying that Jeff Bezos was
| responsible for those actions. But, even if they weren't,
| you're saying the CEO should be rewarded with billions of
| dollars for the actions of the leaders under them, but carry
| none of the blame for those acts as well?
|
| In corporate America, responsibility is on senior leadership,
| and the CEO is at the top of that chain. If they want to have
| the W's of that system, they get to take the L's too.
| WC3w6pXxgGd wrote:
| Maybe you need to stop reading propaganda about Bezos.
| hooande wrote:
| how would you respond if people said you were treating your
| employees unfairly? financial worth has nothing to do with it.
| if he feels that charge is untrue, he should push back against
| it.
|
| I would not be nearly as measured in my response. no sir, I am
| not the one
| davidcbc wrote:
| > how would you respond if people said you were treating your
| employees unfairly?
|
| I'd cry myself to sleep every night on my pile of billions of
| dollars. Poor Jeff.
| gsk22 wrote:
| Financial worth absolutely has to do with the fairness or
| lack thereof. Bezos has created nearly 200 billion dollars
| (!) of wealth for himself since founding Amazon, so debating
| the moral value of those gains in comparison to how everyday
| employees are compensated is well within reason.
|
| And if my employees said I was treating them unfairly, I
| would try to understand their perspective and make changes to
| improve working conditions. But maybe that's why I'll never
| be a CEO.
| fenderbluesjr wrote:
| Some people don't think that 'fair treatment' should be
| determined with the bosses wealth as a factor
| stnmtn wrote:
| Why not? The workers have created enormous value, more
| than any other time in the history of humanity. Why
| shouldn't we frame this in terms of where that value goes
| to?
| Agenttin wrote:
| It's not about his wealth. If Jeff had been independently
| wealthy before starting Amazon this wouldn't be an issue.
| The problem is the percentage workers receive of the
| value they generate. Jeff has gotten rich by pushing that
| number as low as possible, while also working to kill off
| businesses that might offer alternative employment to low
| skill workers.
| hinkley wrote:
| It's relatively common wisdom that you don't become a
| billionaire without fucking over a lot of people. You can
| be CEO just fine, but billionaire CEO is probably not in
| the cards for you.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| > Bezos has created nearly 200 billion dollars (!) of
| wealth for himself
|
| Bezos' employees have created nearly 200 billion dollars of
| wealth for Bezos
| merpnderp wrote:
| Your implication is that Bezos was inconsequential to the
| creation of all that brand new wealth. Surely you don't
| actually believe that and this is just your ideological
| rhetoric to further your politicized beliefs?
| asdff wrote:
| At some point, however, it's momentum and people in the
| engine room driving the ship rather than the captain.
| Replace bezos with another decent business person and I'm
| sure they would have made similar decisions along the way
| and ended up in a similar place today. It's not like
| bezos has some sacred gut, he just hires experts and
| listens to them like any other CEO would do.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| > Your implication is that Bezos was inconsequential to
| the creation of all that brand new wealth
|
| How much wealth would Bezos have created without his
| employees? I sort of imagine one guy with a computer
| running an online bookstore running fulfillment out of
| his garage.
|
| I bet he could make an okay living if he's smart and
| hardworking and lucky but it's a pretty inconsequential
| fraction of 200 billion.
| QuixoticQuibit wrote:
| Your implication is that Bezos' employees were
| inconsequential to the creation of all that brand new
| wealth. Surely you don't actually believe that and this
| is just your ideological rhetoric to further your
| politicized beliefs?
| merpnderp wrote:
| Ah-hah, you made a joke by making up something I never
| said. Funny, but could be improved. Next time try working
| in something I actually said.
| 8note wrote:
| I don't they they could have done it without him there.
| The value of the employee's labour is insignificant
| without the organization and systems he set up.
|
| If they were working somewhere else, they wouldn't be
| generating 200 billion dollars of wealth at all
| josefresco wrote:
| > how would you respond if people said you were treating your
| employees unfairly?
|
| Not sure how "richest man in the world" version of myself
| would react. Certainly I wouldn't use my corporate Twitter
| account to attack (badly) US politicians.
| edoceo wrote:
| Yea, for all that money to spend on the attack, how'd they
| do such an obvious shit-job of it?
| josefresco wrote:
| My theory is that it doesn't need to be high quality as
| the perception that Amazon is "fighting back" against
| corrupt politicians will still take.
| ivan888 wrote:
| > how would you respond if people said you were treating your
| employees unfairly?
|
| Hopefully anyone with that level of wealth would look into
| fixing the actual problem instead of trying to cover it up
| with fake testimony. The point is, he has the money to build
| a working culture where people can feel like they are treated
| fairly, he just chooses not to
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| It's not like he is the only one at Amazon making
| decisions. Along with Bezos, there's a whole host of bad
| actors at Amazon who have decided not to treat workers
| well.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| If people said that about me, I'd call off union vote, and
| just give the union "my blessing" no vote needed, in fact I'd
| encourage a union from day one for any business I start.
|
| A union will not break Amazon, many companies with unions
| still are plenty profitable.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| It would not be a good trait if one would reflexively push
| back at such accusations instead of reflecting inwardly and
| taking in the criticism.
| elwell wrote:
| The question is: are they fake accounts or fake fake accounts?
| The latter would be a pretty ingenious smear campaign.
| [deleted]
| ruste wrote:
| Is it possible this is some galaxy brain plan by those promoting
| amazon unions to undermine amazon's credibility?
| uoaei wrote:
| Who do you think has more time and money to contribute to this
| kind of thing? Union organizers who are already overwhelmed
| just trying to reach the people they're trying to help, or the
| company which delivers almost everything to almost everyone and
| made more money than most countries' GDPs?
| Aunche wrote:
| The third and most likely option is that it's trolls with too
| much time on their hands.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| That's a good point. Unions have never done anything shady,
| they're too busy feeding the poor and rescuing kittens in
| trees.
|
| Snark aside, OP never said it was the union doing it. It
| could just be someone outside the potential union members who
| just supports unions in general, or doesn't support Amazon,
| who is doing it.
|
| What other explanation is there? Do you think there is some
| die-hard Amazon supporter who goes out of their way to
| generate fake profiles and then post messages that wouldn't
| sway anyone?
| ruste wrote:
| Somewhere in another thread someone suggested that amazon
| had a program and incentives for employees to represent
| them positively online so maybe it is just poor PR on their
| part. Still, these days it's hard to take anything at face
| value.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Yes, that's their ambassador program. But I doubt that
| the ambassador program would tell the members to create
| unverified accounts and try to pass them off as official
| amazon ambassador accounts.
| uoaei wrote:
| Essentializing all unions based on the behavior of a few of
| them, vs summarizing a single company's behavior who has a
| visible and obvious track record of breaking up
| unionization efforts via nefarious and underhanded tactics,
| are completely incomparable.
|
| If you want snark, have some back: where did the big bad
| union boss touch you?
|
| > What other explanation is there?
|
| Hired a shoddy offshore bot-writing and astroturfing outfit
| who are obviously not up to the job. It's a very simple,
| and one of the most likely, explanations. Occam's razor
| comes in handy occasionally if you just take the time to
| think a bit.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I never said I was anti-union. I'm just pointing out that
| unions aren't 100% pure forces of good. They have a good
| idea at their heart, and frequently they are abused by
| insiders for personal gain.
|
| > Occam's razor
|
| Amazon _has_ an ambassador program, where they basically
| pay workers to post on twitter about how good their job
| is. You 're saying they have a program for workers to
| post on twitter, and they also hire astroturfers to make
| fake posts of the same thing on twitter, using photos of
| moderately known celebrities as their backgrounds? I
| don't buy it. Amazon made the mistake of creating a
| system where accounts are "verified" merely by a prefix
| of their name - "@AmazonFC...". Therefore anyone can make
| an account that looks like "@AmazonFC...", not just
| Amazon. What amazon should have done is have a single
| official account, or even a single official account which
| links to other official accounts.
|
| Occam's razor tells me that the most likely creator of
| these accounts is a troll who browses reddits
| ABoringDystopia sub, and is just having fun.
| uoaei wrote:
| That's also plausible, and indeed not unlikely. In that
| case, I applaud the tactics. Bravo! brava! anonymous
| internet citizen and empathetic soul!
| esoterica wrote:
| The ambassador program is real but the most recent batch of
| tweets circulating ARE from fake accounts (as in created by
| third party trolls fake, not created by Amazon PR fake).
| ruste wrote:
| Absolutely amazon. I take your point, but when fighting
| against a much larger organization this is exactly the kind
| of guerilla warfare tactic you'd need to come out ahead. This
| kind of information campaign is exactly the sort of thing
| that the internet makes accessible for groups of all sizes.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| It could also be people behind the cause who aren't
| affiliated with either party. I think your point is worth
| noting, though I fully support the workers trying to
| unionize here.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| Maybe I'm giving Amazon too much credit but I would think they
| would do a better job or more likely outsource this out to a
| group that would do a better job. And I'm on the side of the
| employees, hoping they unionize (effectively!).
|
| I'd guess it's neither Amazon or pro-union employees but rather
| random people trying to make Amazon look bad.
| asdff wrote:
| I don't think you need to do a better job to get good results
| with twitter/internet propaganda. No one vets their sources
| and hardly anyone reads past the headline. The only people up
| in arms on this story are people who already know Amazon is a
| toxic environment for the worker. People who have been
| sipping the Bezos Koolaid aren't going to be shaken by this,
| because you can't reason someone out of a position they
| didn't reason themselves into. It's a cheap way to amplify a
| message and exhaust opposition, and it works wonders as we've
| seen these last 5 years or so.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| It's a perfectly pure distillation of Poe's Law. I honestly
| can't tell if it's shilling or satire.
| dralley wrote:
| Is it possible? Yes.
|
| It's about as plausible as you being a galaxy brain suggesting
| that the unions are behind the posts in order to undermine
| amazon's credibility, in order to undermine the union's
| credibility.
| ecnerwala wrote:
| What credibility has Amazon got? (The Amazon experience is
| typically good for a customer, but bad for an employee. My
| question is in that context.)
| medicineman wrote:
| Be careful with that conspiratorial thinking, friend. You might
| start questioning all sorts of narratives you had never before
| been allowed to consider alternatives for.
| techaty wrote:
| want to try amazon prime for free? Then try amazon working
| cookies at https://techaty.com/amazon-prime-video-cookies/
| slibhb wrote:
| Nearly everyone involved in this debate is "fake".
|
| The people railing against Amazon are mostly people who have
| never done manual labor in their lives and (wrongly) view people
| who have as little better than slaves. Even the Amazon (or ex-
| Amazon) employees who speak against the company are doing so in
| an environment where the only tolerated sentiment is attacking
| Amazon. There's no room for nuance. Perhaps that's okay and
| reasonable new provisions for Amazon employees will come out of
| all this or perhaps the debate will get less and less rational.
|
| This situation makes me think of Ikiru, a Kurosawa movie. The
| main character is dying. He looks around for meaning in life and
| eventually settles upon a former employee of his, a young girl.
| He spends time with her and buys her things just to be around
| her, not out of any romantic of sexual motive, just because he's
| drawn to her liveliness, her attitude toward the world.
| Eventually she gets tired of this situation and no longer wants
| to see him. As she leaves, he begs her to tell him how she's so
| happy. She explains that she now works in a factory making toys
| for Japanese kids and this gives her life meaning. The main
| character decides that he can make his life meaningful by
| creating something durable in the world for other people before
| he dies.
|
| My point is that we often view workers as oppressed but an Amazon
| warehouse worker contributes in a very real way to billions of
| people getting things that they need. I write code for a living
| and I'm not convinced that I contribute any more to the world
| than an Amazon warehouse worker. And don't think the workers are
| unaware of this, some of them take pride in it, whether or not
| they express it on twitter, and they should.
|
| A lot of this comes down to your attitude toward the world. Are
| you a pessimist? Do you view human interaction as oppressive, is
| it mainly comprised of corrupt, powerful people manipulating
| kind, weak people? Or are you an optimist? Do you find it
| remarkable that things work as well as they do, do you take pride
| in your part, no matter how small, in keeping civilization
| afloat?
|
| Neither of these sentiments is wrong but only one is taken
| seriously in certain circles.
| rideontime wrote:
| The (fictional) woman in your story probably wouldn't be so
| happy if she was constantly being pushed to work faster, take
| fewer breaks, lest she be automatically fired by some faceless
| algorithm designed solely to squeeze every last drop of
| productivity out of her and the other workers. The point isn't
| that this kind of work is unavoidably miserable, it's that
| Amazon is doing everything it its power to make it as miserable
| as possible.
| [deleted]
| k__ wrote:
| I guess, the time for PGP has finally come.
| jcadam wrote:
| Used to work for an employer that was obsessed with its glassdoor
| rating. Negative reviews of the company were drowned out with
| tons of identical-sounding glowing reviews that I'm pretty sure
| were written by interns.
|
| We were actually "highly encouraged" during new hire orientation
| to go on glassdoor and leave a good review - that was the first
| hint I made a mistake in accepting the job. It was a pretty awful
| place to work.
| asdff wrote:
| This reminds me of the "fake" uber drivers who were texting me
| last election to vote yes on their hand tailored, virtually
| immutable proposition 22. Unfortunately this sort of easy stuff
| works on so many people. Prop 22 passed with 58% of the vote and
| they won. The cynic in me says Amazon knows they won't lose.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| You mean the real Uber drivers who correctly understood that
| Prop 22 would allow them to voluntarily work in the way they
| want to work, despite the fact that well-meaning busybodies
| didn't like it?
| asdff wrote:
| No, they literally hired actors for their headshots. (1,2).
| Drivers also sued Uber for the barage of texts sent to them
| trying to sway their support on the issue (3).
|
| 1. https://i.imgur.com/JlZIpAI.jpg
|
| 2. https://www.backstage.com/u/alisha-elaine-anderson/
|
| 3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/22/uber-
| pr...
| vecter wrote:
| That's b/c Prop 22 actually left many drivers worse off. The
| majority of drivers prefer flexibility.
| disabled wrote:
| Some bots producing fake reviews on Amazon are just too funny to
| write off.
|
| My favorite (https://www.amazon.com/Evaluation-Astroskin-
| Behavioral-Self-...):
|
| "Wow!!!!! this product exceeded all my expectations. When I
| travel through space, I have always wished there was a way to
| measure my vital signs without bulky hardware and uncomfortable
| wires! Arun's project report taught me everything I needed to
| know about the benefits and limitations of astroskin! Now I can
| purchase this system for myself and my crew with confidence that
| I did not have before. I highly recommend this report to anyone
| wanting to measure their blood pressure in space or other
| extremely harsh environments."
|
| The product is being sold for $169.43 on Amazon, and is actually
| a PDF available for free via NASA.gov. See:
| https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20150021842/downloads/20...
|
| As for the peeing in bottles thing, Amazon is not that smart.
| There are people that look completely normal, that experience
| life-threatening autonomic dysreflexia
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_dysreflexia) from having
| to hold their bladder, even if it is just for seconds, like me.
| Perhaps I should try working in a US Amazon warehouse. It would
| be perfect lawsuit material and the ultimate power play against
| their inhumane policies around toileting breaks.
| snarf21 wrote:
| I don't think they are making it _illegal_ to go the bathroom
| they are just making it economically awful. If you miss X
| minutes in an hour, the whole hour doesn 't count. You have to
| deliver X packages per hour everyday and one miss gets you
| written up, which can lead to firing.
|
| You seem to forget that a lot of these workers are unskilled
| and have few choices. Amazon may be paying $15/hr but they will
| work you like dogs. Some people will accept that because they
| need the money and McDonald's just doesn't pay enough. It will
| be interesting to see what Amazon will have to pay if some of
| the minimum wage increases start to pass.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| What I don't get: WHY?
|
| Why is it better for Amazon to pay $15/hour and work you like
| dogs, vs. paying a much lower base rate but a bonus that
| makes it work out to $15/hour if you work yourself like a
| dog, and less if you're less effective? Is overhead so high
| that having more, cheaper but less effective workers doesn't
| work out?
| disabled wrote:
| > I don't think they are making it illegal to go the bathroom
| they are just making it economically awful. If you miss X
| minutes in an hour, the whole hour doesn't count. You have to
| deliver X packages per hour everyday and one miss gets you
| written up, which can lead to firing.
|
| It's called disability discrimination. Getting paid less on
| the sole basis of your disability is generally considered to
| be disability discrimination in the US. Having to use the
| toilet every hour or so for 1-3 minutes to take care of
| business in this case is a reasonable accommodation legally
| mandated in US law. Considering that it is /immediately life-
| threatening/ and /immediately quantifiable/ (via blood
| pressure readings-continuous, spontaneous, or otherwise), it
| is very clear that Amazon would have an extremely difficult
| time weaseling their way out of trouble with their strict
| enforcement of a zero-tolerance, all-or-nothing, policy.
|
| > You seem to forget that a lot of these workers are
| unskilled and have few choices.
|
| Congratulations for pointing out the obvious. There are a ton
| of people who have ended up with UTIs and other health
| consequences from having to not only hold it at Amazon
| warehouse, but also being forced to purposefully dehydrate
| themselves, in the short term and long term. The toilet issue
| is so ridiculous that somebody who can should take them for a
| ride and fight for the people who are less fortunate. I would
| look to it as an adventure and a "summer job". I have legal
| authorization to work in both the US and the European Union
| on a long-term, permanent basis, so why not test the waters?
|
| As I said, the condition I have is immediately life-
| threatening, so it's pretty clear cut that they would be
| putting my life in danger (strokes, seizures, retinal
| detachment, etc.) by "punishing" me for using the toilet.
| Loughla wrote:
| >Getting paid less on the basis of your disability is
| generally considered to be disability discrimination in the
| US.
|
| I mean, I get what you're saying. I work in Disabilities
| quite a bit in my profession - and your view is _generally_
| correct. But there are literal, specific carve-outs for
| employers to pay people with disabilities less.
|
| https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-
| sheets/39-14c-subminim...
|
| >Section 14(c) of the FLSA authorizes employers, [. . .] to
| pay subminimum wages - wages less than the Federal minimum
| wage - to workers who have disabilities for the work being
| performed.
| xmprt wrote:
| Laws usually aren't enforced as they are written. They
| are discovered in the courts. So even though those
| carveouts exist, whether they are applicable to this case
| or not is another question.
| disabled wrote:
| Going to the toilet once per hour for 1-3 minutes is not
| going to allow a company to pay subminimum wages when the
| starting rate is $15/hour. It is a simple, basic,
| /reasonable accommodation/ necessary for me to be able to
| work, at any workplace, that Amazon is legally obligated
| to provide. In fact, it is the only accommodation that I
| would need to work at an Amazon warehouse!
|
| The law you mention above is exploited by companies
| utilizing sheltered work environments (i.e. Salvation
| Army) for people who typically have severe disabilities
| that are often both developmental and intellectual, with
| respect to classification. Obviously companies that
| exploit human labor in this particular context are
| morally bereft.
|
| The key concept here is reasonable accommodation. It is
| not some abstract concept or use-case, like the one you
| pointed out above.
| Loughla wrote:
| Again, I agree with you. I do want to point out, though
| that those are not abstract concept or limited use cases.
| Any business, including competitive employment positions,
| can apply for that license, as long as they meet the
| parameters laid our in the law and regulation. I'm
| assuming that because of its size, Amazon would be
| excluded.
|
| Honestly, though, I am not familiar with the application
| process as we refuse to use it.
|
| That being said, I was genuinely just trying to point out
| that it is, in fact, legal to pay individuals with
| disabilities less than an individual without a
| disability.
|
| Language is important. Claiming that trying to pay
| individual b (who has a disability) any less than what
| you would pay individual a (who does not) for any work is
| automatically disability discrimination is just wrong.
| I've been sued several times by people who believe that
| fact, and have been proven right in my statements by the
| courts.
|
| I don't like it, but I don't control the law.
|
| Please note, I am not saying your needs wouldn't be an
| appropriate accommodation from Amazon. Please note that I
| am not saying it is morally okay to pay individuals with
| disabilities less.
|
| Maybe I'm being too pedantic. But honestly, the number of
| people who genuinely believe that they are entitled to
| get literally whatever they want however they want it,
| regardless of any other factor, simply because of their
| disability is just astounding.
|
| Reasonable is the important part of accommodation.
| disabled wrote:
| > Maybe I'm being too pedantic. But honestly, the number
| of people who genuinely believe that they are entitled to
| get literally whatever they want however they want it,
| regardless of any other factor, simply because of their
| disability is just astounding.
|
| As I said, it's life-threatening, and I can assure you
| that autonomic dysreflexia is one of the worst feelings
| that one can go through as a human. This issue is
| solvable via a basic reasonable accommodation, that I
| have a right to get. I also have a decent work ethic, and
| I understand that I am paid to work--and that is the only
| thing that I should be doing at work.
|
| This is about common decency and basic human rights, not
| about entitlement. The fact that you are conflating the
| right to use restroom (a basic human need), at a
| consistent, non-excessive time interval (so that I do not
| experience a life-threatening state) to be some sort of
| entitlement is absolutely ridiculous. I hope you are not
| a lawyer, because if you are, you really need to change
| your perception around disability related matters.
| However, I will be mindful about the language I use, so
| thank you.
|
| And no, I would not be looking for some settlement, which
| would be ridiculous, foolish, and incredibly short-
| sighted. The issue I am trying to address here, besides
| the matter of disability rights, is just human decency
| and respect towards others. Amazon does not exalt such
| values as a company, but especially so by how it treats
| its employees.
| Loughla wrote:
| >This is about common decency and basic human rights, not
| about entitlement. The fact that you are conflating the
| right to use restroom (a basic human need), at a
| consistent, non-excessive time interval (so that I do not
| experience a life-threatening state) to be some sort of
| entitlement is absolutely ridiculous.
|
| I really want to be clear. I am not doing that. I am
| genuinely not saying you are one of those people, and I
| apologize for my words if that's how it sounded. Your
| case sounds pretty straight forward - just make sure
| there's a bathroom somewhere close.
|
| My experience is that many individuals in the disability
| world (keep in mind I work with youth and young adults
| and their parents/advocates) are very entitled. They
| believe there are no boundaries on what is an acceptable,
| and reasonable accommodation. That is what I was getting
| at.
|
| That statement legitimately had nothing to do with you.
| It was a statement. I get defensive about this because I
| genuinely get sued three or four times a year for access
| complaints that are completely unfounded. I am a huge
| advocate for disability rights, and believe the current
| system of basic access is inadequate. But I am also sick
| of being accused of discrimination because I don't treat
| every individual that I work with like a small doll made
| of crystal.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I don't think they are making it illegal to go the bathroom
| they are just making it economically awful. If you miss X
| minutes in an hour, the whole hour doesn't count. You have to
| deliver X packages per hour everyday and one miss gets you
| written up, which can lead to firing.
|
| Which is actually _worse_. Doing it that way gives Amazon and
| its apologists deflect the blame back onto the victim (e.g.
| the worker made voluntary choice to work at Amazon, and a
| voluntary choice to take the break and accept the cost,
| Amazon fully supports the voluntary choices of its workers,
| if the worker is in a shitty situation, it 's their fault for
| making those choices, etc.), even though Amazon is actually
| responsible for creating the situation and its consequences.
| If they made it "illegal," at least it would make their
| responsibility clear.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| What makes you think it's a bot or paid shill, not a human that
| found it funny that someone is selling such bullshit and making
| fun of that fact?
| asdff wrote:
| Because you can find an example of these ridiculously
| artificial reviews on every single product on the Amazon
| store.
| mimischi wrote:
| What makes you think it's a bot or paid shill, not a human
| that found it funny that someone is selling such bullshit
| and making fun of that fact?
| asdff wrote:
| Because that sort of cynical sarcastic person with too
| much time on their hands is pretty rare given how many of
| these blatant fake reviews I see all over Amazon and
| elsewhere on the internet, where there is a strong
| financial incentive to game reviews. I'm also aware that
| people are far more likely to leave a negative review
| than a glowing one. I'm not going to review some toaster
| I like positively, why would I waste my time on this $30
| toaster that does the job it's supposed to do? But if I
| have an axe to grind, I get serious catharsis warning
| future people from buying this toaster from hell. It's
| especially telling when the reviews are highly bimodal:
| you see either people all have the same exact fault with
| the product, or borderline cult level derangement 5 star
| reviews that don't even mention the name of the product
| and could have been written about anything from a hair
| dryer to a garden hose.
| duskwuff wrote:
| That review is pretty obviously a joke. The account has a long
| history of occasional legitimate-looking reviews on ordinary
| products -- it's nothing like the pattern that's typical of bot
| reviewers.
| aembleton wrote:
| I'm not sure that was created by a bot.
| disabled wrote:
| A lot of my work revolves around physiological research of
| bioelectrical signals produced by the human body. If you have
| spent as much time in this niche field as I have, you would
| know that this had to be a fake, both from the apparent
| context already stated along with details that others do not
| know. For example, for your 5 person "crew" to be using the
| Astroskin, let's just say that you would have to invest
| $10k-$15k to even start. The prices of the Astroskin are
| obscene and are not publicly advertised. Its extremely
| similar, slightly less advanced counterpart, the Hexoskin, is
| much more reasonably priced: https://www.hexoskin.com/
|
| From a technology standpoint, the actual hardware and
| materials for an Astroskin system cost around $175-$200
| (clothing set + processing unit) to produce, so they really
| are making bank.
| wheybags wrote:
| To me, it reads like a joke, not a bot.
| ldbooth wrote:
| Does anyone else think that Amazon news handle is doing damage to
| their brand? Silence seems like a better strategy. they must view
| this union vote as the beginning of the end.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Is there a law that prohibits a company from pretending to be
| employees to broadcast fake anti-union sentiment?
|
| Certainly seems like there should be. I would love to see Amazon
| slapped with a billion dollar fine for these shenanigans.
| marcod wrote:
| I'd like to point out that there are plenty of workers who
| don't believe Unions would be good for them... or they were
| "convinced" in some form.
|
| While it's obvious that the accounts were created by corporate
| you don't know if the tweets are those of real workers or not.
| sequoia wrote:
| Is there any indication/proof that these accounts were in fact
| created or run by Amazon? This certainly seems a lot like someone
| is trolling:
| https://twitter.com/15Deloreans/status/1376678761630998533
|
| 1. Create fake accounts supporting amazon 2. tip your hand that
| they're fake 3. BBC reports on amazon creating fake accounts
| rq1 wrote:
| True Amazon workers try to deny their coworkers their basic
| rights.
| argc wrote:
| As a current AWS employee, I can say I'm proud to be working for
| AWS (at least my organization) but incredibly embarrassed to be
| working for Amazon.
|
| I had written a much more scathing comment about the Amazon side
| of the business but I'm not sure what is allowed under hacker
| news's community guidelines.
| colinprince wrote:
| let's hear it
| heckerhut wrote:
| Please do!
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Why can't we just have a social network that requires you to sign
| up using your government ID? No bots, no fake accounts - problem
| solved.
|
| There won't be any anonymity on that network, sure, but there are
| plenty of other social networks where you can be anonymous.
| maxwell wrote:
| How would you authenticate the physical documents?
|
| https://osamabinnaughty.github.io/FakeID-Barcode/sc.html
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| I mean Bluechecks spread misinformation and harass people all
| the time. Not sure how verification solves anything.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Well, it definitely means you have far more at stake every
| time you comment or participate, since you're putting your
| reputation on the line and creating a public record.
|
| However, I ultimately don't think requiring IDs would be
| effective and it would probably expose at-risk and vulnerable
| groups to greater retaliatory action. It's arguably a bit
| classist as well, since only those who are sufficiently rich
| and powerful enough to protect themselves would be able to
| participate with impunity.
| brown9-2 wrote:
| Why should I trust a social network company with my government
| ID when often they can't even keep my password secure?
|
| Or why would I want to use a social network with onerous signup
| terms?
| [deleted]
| throwawaysea wrote:
| > There won't be any anonymity on that network, sure
|
| That's exactly why. It would allow ideas and speech with
| psychological safety to proliferate while everything else is
| shut down. It's bad enough already due to voluntary censorship
| (cancel culture).
| ezekg wrote:
| Look up the "Fifty Cent Army." You'd be naive to believe other
| corporations and governments do not play the game.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Is this illegal? It should be illegal.
| uniqueid wrote:
| I'd rather we redesigned the internet to make sock-puppetry so
| difficult and costly as to make its legality irrelevant.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Why not both?
| cyberlab wrote:
| You can't fight astroturfing without resorting to astroturfing
| yourself. You have to play the game and do counter-narratives
| to stop this. The law can't keep up with sockpuppetry. It's too
| rampant to kill. Welcome to The Internet.
| nerdponx wrote:
| That doesn't mean it shouldn't be illegal, that just means
| it's hard to enforce.
| barbacoa wrote:
| I am looking forward to the day that twitter is nothing more than
| Russian bots arguing with CIA bots arguing with Chinese bots
| arguing with corporate shill bots. And the only people being
| fooled are advertisers and twitter investors.
| ezekg wrote:
| Welcome to that day! except it's not bots as you imagined --
| it's programmed people.
| asdff wrote:
| I read an article where Russia's Internet Research Agency
| learned it was easier to just take existing propaganda and
| memes, amplify them past the long tail of engagement with
| their bots, and let the racist hateful online population
| snowball that message organically for them.
|
| People aren't rational, we are inherently emotional. Reason
| and logic need to be taught, and controlling your emotions is
| one of the hardest things you can do as a human. These
| propaganda just play into our basic primal fears of safety
| and the unknown at its root. It's not hard to engage with
| these emotions, especially if what you are sharing already
| goes along with this established worldview that some have,
| cultivated by years of past propaganda.
|
| I'm not sure how you reset this, given so many people live in
| lives where they aren't exposed to other perspectives nor
| seek them out.
| ezekg wrote:
| > so many people live in lives where they aren't exposed to
| other perspectives
|
| I don't think it's that people aren't exposed to other
| perspectives -- it's that people have been programmed to be
| vitriol of other perspectives. It's the ever growing
| polarization of world views.
|
| I'm not sure how to reset it either.
| asdff wrote:
| I think exposure at least offers you the opportunity of
| engagement with other perspectives. If your dad is racist
| but you go to school and make a black friend, that might
| change your perspective vs. if you lived in an area where
| mostly white people lived, and you had no practical
| experience to weigh against your dad's racist
| perspective. A lot of people stay siloed, especially
| after schooling ends. They work with the same people for
| decades, attend the same church, or otherwise cement
| their social circle for the most part, since there are
| fewer opportunities to meet people from different
| perspectives as an adult. This is in contrast to say
| undergrad, where half the kids in your dorm were from
| another country and everyone is looking to make friends
| as soon as possible, or public school where you make
| friends both rich and poor because you don't see class
| really when you are six years old, you just want to play
| tag.
| tablespoon wrote:
| This old TechCrunch article from 2018
| (https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/23/what-is-this-weird-twitter...)
| posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26636153 has a
| former "Amazon Ambassador" actually explain that job:
|
| > An actual former ambassador and three year Florida warehouse
| veteran Chris Grantham explained it in more detail to Yahoo
| Finance's Krystal Hu, who shared the information with TechCrunch:
|
| >> When I was there they just got an extra paid day off and a
| gift card after Peak [pre-holiday season]. This is what I got. A
| paid day off (that expired in 3 weeks lol) and a $50 Amazon gift
| card. Plus, they gave us lunch. Coldcuts and sandwich bread. I
| absolutely did not get paid more to train people.
|
| >> Ambassador isn't a 'job' you do every day, its just something
| you are trained to do. You go to a 4 hour class and they teach
| you how to teach others to tie a knot using a set of
| instructions. This is how new hires a supposed to be taught. You
| are supposed to teach them right from a script using a set
| protocol. Becoming an ambassador was a way to get out of loading
| trucks, or packing boxes for 10 to 12 hrs. You may ambassador 1
| day then unload trucks for the next 3.
|
| >> I stopped doing it after the first year I was there because it
| didn't pay more. It's voluntary. Your manager picks them.
| Generally speaking ambassadors are the "kiss asses" of the
| department.
|
| > In case it isn't obvious, Chris is no longer at Amazon and is
| happy to speak his mind. Thanks for helping us clear this up,
| Chris.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| For decades, I never thought people who kiss ass could have
| been serious. I was sure they were just cynically playing a
| game of advancement, and I despised them for it. What I've come
| to learn -- as disappointing as it is to me -- is that some
| people view this sort of thing as actual, legitimate
| opportunity, and are acting out of internal integrity. They
| don't see the hypocrisy of the power imbalance and how the
| company is using them when acting this way. It just doesn't
| factor into their equation.
|
| Higher-ups look for these suck-ups, of course, but I see now
| that the "real" ones are the ones that really advance because
| of it. The process optimizes for what I call the "true
| believers." They wind up in positions where they can, and often
| do, impede the progress of people who want to make significant
| contributions to the bottom line.
|
| The remaining open question in my mind is to what percentage
| the "true believers" actually occupy positions of serious power
| in a Fortune 500 -- say, at the highest 3 levels -- and how
| many people promoting them are just knowingly using them and
| their precious lack of objectivity.
| chacha2 wrote:
| Noam Chomsky with Andrew Marr
|
| https://youtu.be/lLcpcytUnWU?t=173
|
| "If you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting
| where you are sitting"
| [deleted]
| TriNetra wrote:
| You'll get millions of dollars invested in hype-and-nothing-
| really-to-show-for-it startups, or sold for hundreds of
| millions of dollars to a fortune 500 the product which is
| then phased out into a black whole in an year two from the
| buyer company's portfolio for the same reasons - having found
| a right connection at one of those three levels.
| brnt wrote:
| The things people will do for crumbs.
|
| The poor or middleclass aren't the only ones mind you. You
| find willing lackeys at every paygrade.
| [deleted]
| taormina wrote:
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
| principle-...
|
| This is a fantastic read.
| EthanHeilman wrote:
| As I was reading the above post, I started to remember
| reading an article on ribbon farm. The next response is
| someone posting the article I remember. The Hn bubble is
| real and in some cases has surprisingly low-entropy.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| This is too true. I just went through a full MacLeod cycle
| in the past three years and can attest how uncanny the
| accuracy is.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| eeeeehhhhh wrote:
| I knew this was going to be posted. I've been thinking
| about this post for a decade now and I can't help but feel
| that, although it does reflect part of reality, the Gervais
| Principle is overly cynical in my opinion, and those who
| adopt the view will have it compounded by confirmation bias
| because it is partially true.
|
| The things described happen at toxic organizations but the
| author leaves no room for honest positive and meaningful
| work, and at risk of pointing out the obvious, there's a
| lot of meaningful work to be done.
|
| To the author of this post, finding meaning in your
| employment means that you're necessarily a sucker or a
| psychopath. Where does that leave people like doctors who
| earnestly help their patients?
|
| And God forbid you find the real nobility in doing your
| workaday job and doing a good job at it, and feel good
| about yourself. According to the Gervais Principle that
| makes you the ultimate sucker.
|
| Adopting this philosophy is dooming oneself to a
| neverending feeling of being exploited and the argument
| that this is what is actually happening in totality is all
| philosophical opinion so why would I adopt a philosophy
| that is so personally ruinous, demoralizing, and
| demotivating?
| HenryBemis wrote:
| I have been 'studying' Dilbert since the first time I
| laid eyes on it/him 20 years ago.
|
| This cartoon prepares you for life in large-corp
| environments. I've seen so many (real life) scenarios
| play out _exactly_ as some of Dilbert 's (and the other
| chars) stories.
|
| Edit: for clarity, the article does refer to "The Dilbert
| Principle".
| mattmanser wrote:
| He does mention meaningful work, that's done by the
| clueless. But to the author it's a sidenote that he
| doesn't bother explaining. It's this bit where he briefly
| touched on it:
|
| _the standard promotion /development path is primarily
| designed to maneuver the Clueless into position wherever
| they are needed_
| yaml-ops-guy wrote:
| So a transmogrification of The Peter Principle but in
| more words?
| Jedd wrote:
| If by transmogrify you mean changing the intent, along
| with every noun and verb in the original, then maybe.
|
| However it feels like a profoundly different claim to Dr
| Peter's.
| ramblerman wrote:
| Thank you for putting this so eloquently.
|
| I have been down this cycle myself becoming almost
| nihilistic and seeing it all as a pointless game of
| machiavelian diplomacy.
|
| These days I'm much more optimistic, and doing much
| better overall but in hindsight your explanation is
| exactly what I went through at my worst.
| deagle50 wrote:
| Both scenarios can be true, you can be "clueless" and
| optimistic at the same time. Even if the Gervais
| Principle is real, it doesn't mean you need to be
| nihilistic. If your work is giving you meaning and joy,
| does it matter if sociopaths are benefiting more than
| you? It's kind of like being resentful of professional
| athletes, it simply wasn't in the cards... Saying this as
| a definite "loser" btw.
| doublejay1999 wrote:
| Forgive me for being blunt :
|
| > leaves no room for honest positive and meaningful work,
| and at risk of pointing out the obvious, there's a lot of
| meaningful work to be done.
|
| There's plenty of meaningful work to be done, but most of
| it doesn't generate profit, so it doesn't get done. That
| which does get done, often pays poverty wages. Raising
| good citizens, caring for the elderly, educating our
| children, producing high quality nutritious food,
| cleaning our streets of litter - all meaningful and
| vital, all pay buttons. Many more jobs pay so little, we
| dont even bother doing in the West anymore and give those
| jobs to other countries.
|
| > Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly
| help their patients?
|
| What percentage of the workers Doctors ? Bonus : why
| isn't everyone a doctor ?
|
| > Adopting this philosophy is dooming oneself to a
| neverending feeling of being exploited and the argument
| that this is what is actually happening in totality is
| all philosophical opinion so why would I adopt a
| philosophy that is so personally ruinous, demoralizing,
| and demotivating?
|
| Pretending you are happy and contributing to society
| while you are required to piss in a bottle is to concede
| all human dignity. To pretend that giving up 70 hours a
| week crunching numbers so a Corporation pays less tax
| that is to sell your soul and work to the detriment of
| society. To think anything else, means it's already too
| late for you.
|
| tldr : meaningful jobs exist, but are rare as rocking
| horse shit and great swathes of us never get to
| experience meaningful jobs, because our culture needs
| obedient workers to make profits ahead of anything else.
| mdpopescu wrote:
| > Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly
| help their patients?
|
| In fiction?
|
| Back on the original topic, Erik Dietrich's "Developer
| Hegemony" has a less extreme view of the corporation;
| worth reading IMO.
| mrfredward wrote:
| +1 For Dietrich's version of it. He renames sociopaths,
| clueless, and losers to opportunists, idealists, and
| pragmatists, and in general tones the theory down a bit,
| and I think the result is something that is both more
| palatable and more reflective of reality.
|
| The opportunists see the corporate world for what it is
| and do what is best for their careers, the idealists
| believe in the shared corporate myths and put in the
| hours to uphold the values they're taught, and the
| pragmatists value being home for dinner more than
| climbing the ladder. It describes the broken system
| without implying all the people in it are broken, and
| since the focus is really on the incentive systems that
| create this situation I think that's a better take.
| rhizome wrote:
| Is the corporate world "what it is" without the actions
| of these categories of employees? You may have the
| causation arrow pointing the wrong way, because to me,
| being more "reflective of reality," it's better worded
| as, "the corporate world is composed of the decisions,
| actions, and personalities of (sociopaths|opportunists),
| (the clueless|idealists), (losers|pragmatists)." Your
| choice of terminology is only a value judgement on each
| of the categories, but it's all the same people, working
| in a company, and making it a living thing. The specific
| words don't change the meaning of the principles being
| discussed.
|
| I don't think the subjects of the Gervais categories are
| broken people so much as dangerous ones, careerwise (and
| possibly mental healthwise).
| jfk13 wrote:
| > although it does reflect part of reality, the Gervais
| Principle is overly cynical in my opinion
|
| Of course it is. That's what comedians do: they take
| something with enough basis in reality that people will
| recognise and identify with it, and then caricature and
| exaggerate it to extremes.
| [deleted]
| rgblambda wrote:
| >Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly
| help their patients?
|
| Making positive contributions to society doesn't change
| the fact that you're being exploited. It's become
| increasingly clear that Doctors (at least where I'm from)
| have low pay early in their careers, unsafe working
| conditions, and have almost no life outside of work. On
| top of that they have a stressful job involving
| interacting with members of the public.
| thethought wrote:
| An alt-side is never ending pleasure of closing laptop at
| the bell .. in anticipation of bbq, wine, family, and
| friends. Knowing fully well it's ephemeral. IMO there is
| no doom and gloom in this view.
| MarkPNeyer wrote:
| I agree with your analysis here, although from what I
| understand he argues that these phenomena have to do with
| working for big companies. The book "developer hegemony"
| makes a similar argument and argues that the "way out is
| to have lots of small software consulting shops.
| impendia wrote:
| > Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly
| help their patients?
|
| Not a doctor, but a college professor. I love my job,
| take pride in it, and work hard at it. But I think of
| myself as working for my students, my collaborators, and
| my immediate colleagues. I pay little attention to my
| university as a whole, don't view it especially
| positively, haven't learned how to work its bureaucracy,
| and feel little loyalty to the institution in general.
|
| It seems that, according to the article, I'm a "loser".
| As such, "it is clear that I am an idiot". Probably true
| lol. But a fairly happy idiot.
| [deleted]
| gabereiser wrote:
| It's not just Amazon. You'd be surprised at how middle-upper
| management operates the same way at large enterprises. At
| least from my experience. Some were good at their jobs, most
| were there because of who they knew.
| GordonS wrote:
| I've worked at various enterprise-scale companies over the
| past 2 decades, and this has been my observation too.
|
| As you say, there are exceptions, but a lot of managers are
| there because they've "played the game" well - they're good
| at networking, know the right people, say the right things
| at the right times, and when they think it will help them,
| they don't hesitate to throw other people under a bus.
| vimacs2 wrote:
| This rings so true and is seen in a lot of other industries
| as well. I believe the world of gaming is among the worst for
| this where hordes of customers ardently defend the clearly
| abusive practices of multinational companies that do not give
| the slightest shit about them except their influence on their
| bottom line.
|
| Gamers find it easier to be up in arms about journalists
| being bad at video games and women having too many opinions
| on their hobby than the fact that they are getting actively
| screwed over by the hyper-predatory monetisation tactics of
| the game publishers and the fact that a company like
| Activision let go of more than a hundred employees on the
| same week as they gave Bobby Kotick a $200 million bonus.
| undefined1 wrote:
| gamers are simultaneously angry with that Activision
| example AND the invasion of political activists into the
| hobby.
| vimacs2 wrote:
| Sure but you are being disingenuous if you think that the
| outrage on Activision is even remotely comparable to the
| backlash against feminism in gaming.
|
| There is also no actual objective problem that feminism
| has caused to gaming that gamers can point to and I would
| argue that the vehement backlash against it is as driven
| by the "invasion of political activists into the hobby"
| as Anita Sarkeesean and other feminist pundits.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| > Gamers find it easier to be up in arms about journalists
| being bad at video games and women having too many opinions
| on their hobby
|
| Why lump real concerns in with blatant sexism?
| vimacs2 wrote:
| Probably because the actual influence of "official" video
| game journalists has waned significantly compared to
| individual critics on Youtube and other platforms.
|
| Yes, it's pretty pathetic that somebody who's job
| involves playing video games got stuck on the tutorial of
| Cuphead but then again, who cares? I don't consider it a
| real concern simply because outlets like IGN are waning
| in influence anyway.
|
| A far more insidious concern that bears barely no
| attention is the fact that publishers practice shady shit
| like deliberately withholding review copies to overly
| critical reviewers or how journalists are incentivised to
| prioritise officially mandated press releases over
| reports of abuse. Notice how the very recent case of the
| rampant sexual and racial abuse in Ubisoft has been
| nearly forgotten by video game journalism.
|
| Movements like Gamergate failed because aside from the
| rampant sexism within their ranks, their focus was
| narrowly on individual bad actors in video game
| journalism when the real problem is more systematic than
| that.
| devindotcom wrote:
| I was going post that link but you beat me to it. When I wrote
| that it was as I suspected, disingenuous but not wholly
| invented - these were real people being bribed with cold cuts
| to parrot scripts, if I'm honest I might have done it to get
| off my feet for a couple hours in that situation. It was stupid
| and risible but you could understand it.
|
| Now it's gotten much weirder. There are fake accounts that,
| looking at them, you're not sure who they actually benefit. I
| think a bunch just got purged. No one took them seriously
| anyway, so navigating the motivations in the space is super
| difficult. It's fascinating in some ways but in others I just
| want to ignore the whole thing.
| elmomle wrote:
| Wow, does that ever sound inspired by the Kapo system in Nazi
| camps.
|
| (edit: It was wrong of me to evoke Nazism due to its emotional
| connotations. I was reminded of the psychological systems of
| coercion that have been used all through history to efficiently
| keep oppressed people in line--which Amazon's actions reek of--
| but could have more effectively expressed my thoughts by saying
| "that sounds like a psychologically abusive system", or
| something of the sort.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Really? Did the Nazis give their prisoners a day out of the
| camp and 50 Deutschmark to treat themselves with?
|
| I don't think it's fair to compare this to genocide camps.
| elmomle wrote:
| "Inspired by". And yeah, the conditions are far less
| extreme, but the dynamics of using prisoner's dilemma to
| reinforce order in the warehouse is deeply cruel,
| psychologically. Please don't argue that.
| nemo44x wrote:
| It's giving people the option to do something else for
| awhile and get a small bonus on top. I had numerous jobs
| when I was young that had similar incentive structures if
| you wanted it. I doubt my managers were picking it up
| from Goebbles.
| elmomle wrote:
| But were you specifically being the manager's patsy,
| training other workers and inducting you into a
| psychological culture of aligning with the manager?
| abraae wrote:
| Never go full Godwin
| sushid wrote:
| This reminds me strongly of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. These
| poor folks are overworked and used up and the "kiss asses" get
| a little something extra for busting up any hint of unionizing.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| Why is "fake" in scare quotes? The accounts are fake.
| brown9-2 wrote:
| It is not really clear which type of "fake" they are - if it is
| non-Amazon-employees making a parody, or someone at Amazon
| making a not-really-existing persona:
|
| > It is unclear whether the accounts are real employees, bots
| or trolls pretending to be Amazon Ambassadors.
| amelius wrote:
| Quotes are not the appropriate tool to denote uncertainty.
| tomlagier wrote:
| What is? I see quotes used this way in written
| communication fairly commonly.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| It's a common practice in journalism. They're not using
| scare quotes, but regular quotes. They're avoiding
| asserting themselves that the accounts are fake, and
| instead, diverting the assertion to the quotee (Amazon in
| this case).
| darkerside wrote:
| It is a way to indicate that you are not asserting the
| label, somebody else is. So it is actually a very useful
| way to indicate uncertainty. Amazon has deep pockets, and
| people don't want to be sued.
| amelius wrote:
| I wouldn't call that an expression of uncertainty,
| though. The fact that it is not clear who made the
| statement cannot be deduced from the quotes.
| darkerside wrote:
| I'm not saying what you appear to think I am saying.
|
| The author is making it clear that they are not the one
| who called the accounts fake. This implies uncertainty
| because if the accounts were objectively fake, there
| would be little need to add the quotation marks.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Amazon's own spokesperson called them fake. From the
| article:
|
| > "It appears that this is a fake account that violates
| Twitter's terms," the spokesperson said. "We've asked
| Twitter to investigate and take appropriate action."
| cwkoss wrote:
| The profile pictures have visual artifacts consistent with
| GAN generation
| https://twitter.com/erikhinton/status/1376636650420203523
| jethro_tell wrote:
| It is clear. Some of those were created with gmail addresses
| and done with the web client instead of sprinklr like the
| amazon fake accounts. Those all use amazon email accounts and
| sprinklr.
|
| Which obviously a real box packer isn't going to have a
| sprinklr acct so you know at the very best someone is getting
| a 15 minute break while a pr rep looks over their shoulder
| and more likely they all work at the same desk in a corporate
| office.
| brown9-2 wrote:
| how do you know what email someone signed up for Twitter
| with?
| danaliv wrote:
| They're not scare quotes; they're someone-said quotes. It just
| means someone from the Beeb hasn't personally gone and
| physically investigated the authenticity of the accounts. It's
| the difference between the BBC claiming "these accounts are
| fake" vs. them claiming "so-and-so says these accounts are
| fake."
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| They are not "scare quotes", it is part of the BBC's style
| guide. It is to make clear that they are not the ones declaring
| that the accounts are fake, but that it is attributed to
| someone else.
| raincom wrote:
| So, it is to signify the use-mention distinction. BBC doesn't
| use it, but mentions it.
| [deleted]
| auiya wrote:
| Can any former Amazon employees confirm if Amazon is indeed a
| cult? Do we need an intervention? Blink once for yes, twice for
| no.
| marcod wrote:
| I don't think it's a cult. (I've been out for 5 years)
|
| But if you want to keep your job, you don't speak out publicly
| ( https://thetyee.ca/News/2020/05/18/Fired-Amazon-Designer-
| Pun... )
| auiya wrote:
| I guess this is why I'm being downvoted by current cult
| members.
| Jamieee wrote:
| They're not a cult, they are... _checks leadership principles_
| having backbone and disagreeing with you.
| nautilus12 wrote:
| Does no one suspect any longer that Amazon is behind this? The
| Twitter Amazon partnership makes no sense if not for this
| purpose. The Parler situation suddenly has a new light, I
| guarantee if you dig hard enough you will find amazon had a
| nefarious part to play in in.
| skohan wrote:
| I feel like authenticity of online communication is an unsolved
| problem. The web was supposed to be a democratizing platform: all
| you need to communicate with the world is an ISP and a keyboard.
| But if there's no way to control for authenticity, online
| sentiment will just be an arms race for who can pay for the best
| astroturfing.
| axguscbklp wrote:
| As far as I know, the authenticity of communication in general
| is an unsolved problem. The web just reflects this. Just like
| with communication in general, if one wants authenticity, one
| has to add procedures for verifying authenticity on top of a
| system that doesn't have any built in.
| resonanttoe wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
|
| Perhaps there is something in this about internet
| communications coming/going full circle with more episodes like
| this Amazon fiasco.
| mox1 wrote:
| Yes, and if you are somewhat tech savvy OR "grew up" on the
| internet (say 40 and younger) you understand this. The problem
| is previous generations who don't really understand this.
|
| Perhaps one angle to tackle the problem is to educate the
| group(s) of people who continue to believe whatever they read
| on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
| tertius wrote:
| They're already being educated...
| fipar wrote:
| I agree on the need to educate people, but disagree on the
| age group criteria. I've met enough people under 40 who
| believe whatever they read online, especially if it confirms
| their existing set of beliefs.
| fastball wrote:
| Yeah, I actually think the group that is least susceptible
| to this is millennials, who group around the anonymity of
| IRC / early 4chan / etc, but before people were even
| _pretending_ to use real identities on the internet.
| munk-a wrote:
| The difference is that we got to make mistakes when we
| were young.
|
| Did you once have a myspace page or live journal where
| you said very controversial things or vented angst in a
| manner that you'd rather your co-workers didn't see? Well
| sorry but all that stuff now goes into your facebook feed
| where it will be with you _forever_.
|
| It takes real determination to stay actually anonymous on
| the internet today and someone trying to stumble into it
| is likely going to screw it up - when we millennials were
| growing up that personal data you accidentally leaked
| onto a forum (maybe during a spicy exchange of direct
| messages) can't follow you since that forum no longer
| exists - it was probably hosted on PHPBB and either an
| admin accidentally deleted the DB at some point or the
| whole server was chucked in the trash - even if someone
| had access to those messages it would be harder to
| definitively tie it back to someone since user
| fingerprinting was so non-existent.
|
| That all said, I was in the middle of University when
| folks were learning that bong-shots on your facebook page
| might hurt your long term job prospects so we did get to
| see it start to emerge as a concern.
| HDMI_Cable wrote:
| That's basically everyone. Confirmation Bias is one hell of
| a drug.
| munk-a wrote:
| I've found this very disturbing, the generation I grew up
| in _might_ be the most tech literate but I think that 's a
| false impression due to the friends that I've chosen. When
| I joined a guild in an MMO and got to see some truly random
| folks from other walks of life that was a fair bit eye
| opening.
|
| My concern about younger folks is that the world is
| shrinking as large corporations try and squeeze as much
| revenue as possible out of markets - the movement of Apple
| to lock down the app store and force people into safe
| walled gardens just so they can control the revenue stream
| might be one of the worst blows of tech literacy of the
| modern world. Instead of young folks getting devices and
| struggling with malware and hacking at programs to make
| them do what they want. They're growing up in a sterile
| environment full only of buttons: this button causes "A" to
| appear on the screen and this button plays a movie. God
| forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get "A" to
| appear over the movie - doing that is hacking and very
| naughty so you should never do it.
|
| I remember programming solitaire for an introductory java
| programming course in uni and hacking a BufferedImage to
| force some cards to be overlaid by writing in the different
| card images at different offsets that is not the right way
| to do that but it works - we need to make sure that new
| generations are brought up empowered to hack things in
| creative ways.
| cacarr wrote:
| I think people conflate a high degree of modern GUI
| proficiency with general technical literacy.
|
| I'm not sure kids who grew up with an iPad appliance are
| really more generally technically literate on average
| than GenXers who entertained themselves trying to write
| Choose You Own Adventure-type stories in BASIC on their
| Commodore 64s ... or who, at least, managed to get their
| pirated copy of Stellar 7 to run.
| asdff wrote:
| This was me in my old research lab. I had to teach an
| undergrad how to copy and paste text into notepad and
| save the file on the shared drive. The kid grew up on
| iPads and had no idea how to work a desktop, nor had a
| great understanding of what a file or directory structure
| is. Things I took for granted.
|
| It used to be the GUI was basically the same as a CLI but
| with clicks instead of typing out "cp" "mv" etc. Now the
| GUI to CLI relationship is severed. You have an iPhone
| and the GUI it runs is basically running on top of the
| underlying CLI that apple hides from you (and you need to
| jailbreak the phone in order to gain access).
|
| Imagine if Apple just gave these kids root and a terminal
| app, and the files app actually showed you the directory
| structure of the device. They could be scripting on these
| machines and learning about how they function same as we
| did growing up.
|
| Instead, apple things we need to hold these kids hands
| and should learn Swift and other low code efforts
| instead. IMO these kids don't need an easy bake oven to
| learn to cook, they need a kitchen and the freedom to
| learn how to burn themselves like we had. Apple is afraid
| of letting their customers operate the stove they bought.
| ksm1717 wrote:
| This is how I feel when using visual studio.
| toomanyducks wrote:
| > the world is shrinking as large corporations try and
| squeeze as much revenue as possible out of markets
|
| this. My friends (I'm in highschool) that aren't as
| experienced in technology (use it as you describe, "God
| forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get 'A' to
| appear over the movie") are genuinely terrified of
| opening the terminal and using anything just slightly out
| of how it was meant to be used because they don't want to
| 'hack anything'.
|
| > we need to make sure that new generations are brought
| up empowered to hack things in creative ways.
|
| also this. Unfortunately, much easier said than done.
| simias wrote:
| I don't buy the age thing at all. Younger generations are
| superficially more tech savvy but it doesn't really help
| here.
|
| Just go browse reddit for 10 minutes if you don't believe me.
| I recommend the /r/GME cult for instance, but there are many
| others. People will gladly listen to anybody if they tell
| them what they want to hear.
| twirlip wrote:
| Vernor Vinge is 76 years old and outlined the issue of
| identity in the online world in his short story "True Names"
| waaay back in 1981.
| finiteseries wrote:
| Vernor Vinge was a professor of computer science and
| mathematics writing SF on the side, and thus qualifies
| under "somewhat tech savvy".
| xxs wrote:
| Age has little to do with that. No idea why you'd draw the
| line at the early 80s (the time SMTP/email was born). Given
| the _influencers '_ target demography is predominantly people
| in their teens and 20s, trusting all you can read online
| should be related to lack of (critical) thinking rather than
| age.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I understand it but realized I haven't knowingly seen it. Are
| there any good examples of Reddit or HN comments that are not
| genuine? I don't do "posts", but do participate in comment
| sections / conversations, and would like to see some examples
| of conversations where one party is confirmed to be a bot or
| troll.
| agentdrtran wrote:
| not being able to believe anything you see online because you
| know everything can be fakes isn't super healthy either.
| asdff wrote:
| >Yes, and if you are somewhat tech savvy OR "grew up" on the
| internet (say 40 and younger) you understand this.
|
| I really don't think that's the case. The issue isn't knowing
| how to use a computer or not, it's being able to vet sources.
| That is taught at few schools and actually applied by fewer
| still.
|
| Digital natives are even more susceptible to internet
| propaganda imo, since listening to obscure internet voices
| (with no real credibility beyond the size of their flock of
| sheep of subscribers/followers) has become so normalized over
| listening to actual domain experts. A lot of people like to
| get their current events from some talking head on youtube
| who selectively explains these topics in a biased way, rather
| than reading primary sources and developing their own
| interpretation themselves.It's not geriatrics and baby
| boomers buying this dropshipped junk from all these
| influencers, after all. Plus look at all the millenials who
| stormed the capitol a few months ago based on some conspiracy
| theory. No, being able to use gmail and microsoft office do
| not make you tech savvy or immune to propaganda.
| barsonme wrote:
| > Perhaps one angle to tackle the problem is to educate the
| group(s) of people who continue to believe whatever they read
| on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
|
| Unfortunately this isn't just limited to the over 40 crowd.
| People are willing to believe whatever affirms their beliefs.
| Growing up on the Internet does not change this.
| failrate wrote:
| I remember before common folk had internet, and there was
| still disinformation, misinformation, and plain bullshit.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Media literacy, marketing techniques, and propaganda
| techniques really need to be part of an elementary school
| education. But the US's education system is a giant
| underfunded mess, so good luck adding anything useful
| like that. I got a decent education in that sort of thing
| but it was entirely through my parents and stuff they got
| for me, Consumer Reports used to have a great kid's
| magazine that combined reviews of kid products with that
| sort of education, for instance.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| There was. But the Internet makes it so much easier to
| deliver it with bad faith in industrial quantities, using
| manipulative sources who are not who they pretend to be.
|
| The impersonation can be more damaging than the content,
| because it's a variety of toxic mental pollution - a form
| of betrayal - that lowers the SNR of the entire Internet.
| blackearl wrote:
| Might be partially true but young people with no critical
| thinking skills fall for it just the same.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| It's easy to knock people for 'lacking critical thinking'
| but the truth is we're all predisposed to believe what
| aligns with our personalities and worldviews. And people
| like to harp on the idea that we should be teaching
| critical thinking in schools, but we already do this and we
| have been teaching it for decades.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| Googling for critical thinking curricula and high school
| district returns Henrico County (VA) on page 5 or 6.
|
| One would think if it were integrated with other studies
| it would be mentioned somewhere other than Edutopia and
| Walden adverts.
| Loughla wrote:
| Have you ever dissected a novel in English class? Did you
| discuss motivations for various historical events in
| history? Did you talk about theory of public speaking
| purposes and styles?
|
| I did, in a very rural, very underfunded school district
| - all of those things are critical thinking.
|
| It is integrated into other studies. But there tend to
| not be "This lesson is critical thinking" sorts of
| headers on the lesson plans.
|
| Look for the phrase "lifelong learner". That tends to be
| where the "critical thinking" lives for many schools.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| CT is ambiguously defined and complex in theory and
| practice. While analysis and evaluation of selected
| novels is intended to enlighten perspectives idk that
| curricula is rational or skeptical based on reading
| lists. Maybe an effect on bias.
|
| It's been awhile, but would wonder how unbiased today's
| history books are. I can't see the State of Texas board
| being nuanced about the Alamo.
|
| I can see a rural district where teachers/schools have
| much more control over curricula, so enlightment or
| indoctrination is easier to influence. I dont see this
| scaling to large administrative/measurement bound
| districts. How does one test to CT outside perhaps
| secondary effects of STEM or AP results? It does appear
| that higher percentages of students are taking AP tests
| though.
|
| Being educated by Jesuits, we started with
| Socrates/Plato. But looking at my classmates FB feeds I
| don't see any evidence of sober CT skills. Skepticism is
| a synonym of conspiricism in today's generations. Biases
| are polar bound.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| > we should be teaching critical thinking in schools, but
| we already do this and we have been teaching it for
| decades.
|
| This is news to me. What countries are you referencing?
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| The United States, where I went to school. I also want to
| apply some critical thinking myself and ask "why wouldn't
| schools have critical thinking as part of their
| curriculum"?
|
| Teaching critical thinking skills is not some
| revolutionary idea and it's not like educators want to
| avoid teaching people how to do it.
| creato wrote:
| > "why wouldn't schools have critical thinking as part of
| their curriculum"?
|
| "Knowledge-Based Education - We oppose the teaching of
| Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values
| clarification), critical thinking skills and similar
| programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based
| Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on
| behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging
| the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental
| authority."
|
| Page 13: https://web.archive.org/web/20120629111643/http:
| //s3.amazona...
| Judgmentality wrote:
| I never felt like critical thinking was part of the
| curriculum in the United States. I've always been kind of
| amazed how poorly it's taught if it's taught at all.
|
| Since we're just comparing anecdata at this point (or at
| least I am), if you have any data/studies or anything
| like that it would be appreciated.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| To be honest I don't want to go into JStor to search for
| studies that support my viewpoint and lob them at you in
| a game of citation tennis. But, I will distill my
| viewpoint down as best I can and leave it at this:
|
| People claim that critical thinking is not taught in
| schools because it's an easy claim to make when you
| perceive that so many other people are thinking
| uncritically. But, make a claim they disagree with and
| watch how good they become at it. Everyone falls into a
| trap of thinking that society at large lacks 'common
| sense' or 'critical thinking' because we all assume our
| worldview is true and anyone who disagrees must have
| deficient thinking. Ultimately I think people are taught
| how to think critically, but the real problem is _when_
| they choose to think critically. And that, I think, is a
| result of human nature, not lack of education.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| Sorry, but I strongly disagree with you. Allow me to
| respond with my own anecdote.
|
| I remember when I was dating a doctor being appalled by
| her complete inability to think through a problem, and I
| later learned medical school is basically mass
| memorization. I am obviously cherry picking medicine
| here, but if doctors aren't even taught that by the time
| they're practicing in the United States I think it's fair
| to say critical thinking is sorely lacking in our
| education system. She was a neurologist who was unable to
| help me with my migraines, and I later figured them out
| on my own using ~ _drumroll_ ~ critical thinking. I also
| saw at least a half dozen specialists at prestigious
| hospitals, all of whom were equally unhelpful in solving
| my problem. They were all very quick to prescribe pain
| medication though, in fact it seemed to be the only thing
| any of them were ever interested in doing. Some of them
| accused me of lying about my symptoms, and some told me I
| shouldn't even bother trying to get better.
|
| If US doctors - some of the best educated and most highly
| trained professionals in the world - aren't good at
| thinking critically about medicine, I'm not confident
| that it's being taught in the US. In fact I'm quite
| confident it's _not_ taught in the US (or at least it
| wasn 't). I was never taught critical thinking in a
| classroom setting, and I have multiple degrees from the
| US.
| axguscbklp wrote:
| Also, the nature of most schooling goes against using it
| to teach critical thinking. Most schooling is forced on
| the students. It is difficult, though not impossible, for
| a system that coerces people to also teach those same
| people critical thinking. There is an inherent
| contradiction there.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Strangely, I see a lot of the same people complaining about
| the critical thinking skills of others and also lashing out
| at others for thinking critically about whatever
| conspiratorial narrative the former are selling.
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| My feeling is that everyone falls for it. Maybe not to the
| same extent, but most of us probably only notice when we
| disagree with what's being said.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I've definitely seen Facebook posts that appear to be
| weaponised alignment with one particular view I happen to
| agree with, but which really just seem to be there to
| stir up conflict and create division.
|
| It's gotten to the point that I don't really trust anyone
| on Facebook in certain contexts - although I'm more
| likely to trust someone if their position shows some
| flexibility and avoids purely tribal thinking, and also
| if they show some evidence of background knowledge and
| general thoughtfulness.
|
| I'm less likely to trust anyone whose position encourages
| extreme polarisation, who appears to be disguising
| intent, whose posts are repetitive, and who tend towards
| inflammatory emotive language and insinuation.
|
| This isn't infallible and I know I've made mistakes in
| both directions. But I hope it's better than just getting
| astroturfed.
|
| Edit: I don't think critical thinking skills help as much
| as they should. This isn't about assessing evidence, it's
| about assessing _intent_ - which is a different problem.
| kibleopard wrote:
| Agreed for sure, but even the younger generations seem
| susceptible to believing whatever they read on Twitter, etc.
| There have been countless times I've seen people share info
| as de facto truth when they simply glanced at a headline
| Twitter pushed them without bothering to read deeper.
| javajosh wrote:
| My hope is that it all seems like a joke to the youngsters,
| and they don't take any of it seriously. In other words,
| they know its a lie but share it anyway because it's funny
| to do so and a lie has a group momentum that can crush you
| if you stand in its way, so why bother? Look at gay
| marriage - the lie that it's akin to beastiality, or the
| lie that it will ruin straight marriate, these are lies
| that are actually quite funny as satire. But to treat them
| as sincere beliefs, and argue with them, is not worth the
| inevitable trouble and negativity.
|
| Young minds know how to deal with the polluted
| informational space and learn to get value out of it one
| way or another.
|
| The informational gems that we need to hold up with high
| regard are examples of sincere discussion and debate
| between those who disagree with each other and yet have a
| genuine goal to hear and be heard by the counter-party, a
| deep reluctance to deploy rhetorical tricks, and a
| willingness to support controversial views _if they are
| supported by uncontroversial fact_.
| clairity wrote:
| _everyone_ supports things they don't necessarily believe
| is 'truth'. it's why political discussions are often
| tiresome and distracting. they posit that one side
| believes a falsehood (like the election was stolen, masks
| will save the world, or qanon anything) and then argues
| about that incessantly, rather than understanding the
| underlying emotions and motivations and then having
| conversations based on those understandings.
|
| for instance people insist the election was stolen, not
| because they literally know it to be true, but rather
| because the outcome, that democrats control national
| politics, is somehow unacceptable. a productive
| discussion would start here, with why that's
| unacceptable, not quibbling over whether the election was
| actually stolen or not (it wasn't).
| thevardanian wrote:
| The secret is they don't believe in anything.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| I'd add HN to that list!
|
| I have previously downvoted comments on my opinion on some
| instances of this on HN lol
| ajmurmann wrote:
| There is a book called Because Internet. It's about
| linguistic change on the internet. It starts out by dividing
| internet into different periods and defining meaningful
| cohorts of users. The later part makes for a much more
| meaningful separation than old vs young. In fact younger
| users are often less techy than older cohorts since at some
| point you had to be technically fluent to even get on the
| internet.
| neilv wrote:
| Since HN loves to veer wildly into rampant ageism, I'll
| bite... :)
|
| When you make your age distinctions, you might be talking
| about people who are non-technical.
|
| Early Internet techies predicted situations like this before
| they happened. (Pre-Web, we had all kinds of sci-fi
| predictions, awareness from historical analogues, etc. Post-
| Web, I talked with startup founders 20 years ago, who would
| also be 40yo+ by now, who predicted that their company's
| accounts would be used for shill identities for things like
| manipulation, and the implications of that.)
|
| Passive consumers, of your under-40 group, who grew up in it
| never knew anything else, have had things framed for them,
| and are just starting to realize the situations we're now in.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| Wouldn't that happen in perpetuity for every generation
| growing up in technology? We want to shield our children
| from the rest of the internet, and so children grow up with
| an internet framed for them. Then, as they grow, they are
| forced to deal with the concept of the internet not being
| framed anymore and may therefore have some time in their
| teenage to young adult years where they may be susceptible
| to shit like eg. outrage culture.
| stonogo wrote:
| It's much easier to just pick someone to frame everything
| for you than it is to develop critical thinking skills. I
| would wager the majority of people from any generation
| wind up choosing the former, even if it's not a conscious
| choice. I don't think it's something people 'grow out of'
| by default.
| [deleted]
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _The problem is previous generations who don 't really
| understand this._
|
| No, this isn't the reason, you're missing some crucial
| context about the early to mid 90s Internet - most people
| were using institutional accounts. It was very clear that
| someone with a whatever.ac.uk or .edu or .mil or even most
| .com that weren't ISPs were who they said they were, and
| anons were explicitly anons. Many people even had phone
| numbers and addresses in their .sig blocks posting on Usenet,
| or on their homepages. There was a pretty high degree of
| trust, it was comparatively civilised!
|
| The problem is that people got stuck in that assumption.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| > _But if there 's no way to control for authenticity, online
| sentiment will just be an arms race for who can pay for the
| best astroturfing._
|
| If you strike the word "online" this statement works for most
| of history.
|
| The only things that have changed are the sheer scale, speed,
| and cost of it. We have small teams that can generate more
| noise than a nation state could have prayed for just a
| generation ago.. and they're doing it faster and cheaper than
| ever before.
|
| Unfortunately, most of the proposed solutions - real names,
| verified identities, fighting "disinformation" - come with
| catastrophic downsides.
| 542458 wrote:
| What about just requiring companies to identify paid
| messaging (like political ads: "Paid for by XYZ")? Obviously
| this doesn't solve any messaging coming from overseas, but it
| at least helps with companies with an American presence
| astroturfing their own reviews etc.
| natosaichek wrote:
| Enforcement is the challenge. Without tracking down every
| reviewer, there is currently no way to determine whether a
| review was left by an employee of a covered/relevant
| company, or just a 'civilian.'
| umvi wrote:
| What are the catastrophic downsides to real names and
| verified identities? Those things weren't catastrophic
| downsides before the internet existed when publishing your
| opinion in newspapers or books or whatever.
| 542458 wrote:
| I think the argument is that those systems DO contain
| significant downsides (ease of censorship, discouraging
| socially unacceptable viewpoints, etc) that you'd be
| porting to the web.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| censorship and discouraging socially unacceptable views
| _is the upside_. What else do you think throwing Amazon
| shill bots off your platform is? That 's the entire point
| of identity systems. Deciding who stays in and who stays
| out and sanctioning bad actors. Identity makes it so that
| harming a community has costs, and helping a community
| accrues trust. That's all it is.
| stale2002 wrote:
| No, it is the downside.
|
| Everyone has 1 million different opinions that are going
| to be controversial to _someone_ out there.
|
| I don't want it to be easy for anyone who disagrees with
| people, on anything, to track down someone physically, in
| real life.
|
| > Deciding who stays in and who stays
|
| Ok and I don't want you to be able to decide who stays in
| and stays out.
|
| It should be very difficult to keep others that you don't
| like out.
|
| And for the very extreme situations, that are
| exceptionally bad, we have the police and court system.
|
| You should only be able to "keep people out" of engaging
| in speech if their actions are so bad that you are
| literally willing to lock them up in prison for it.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >to track down someone physically, in real life.
|
| That's not the same as having a consistent identity on
| the internet. You can easily think of an identity
| provider on the web that doesn't expose who you
| physically are, think of like a crypto wallet, or
| something like Urbit attempts. Having a consistent
| identity is what matters with an incentive to be a good
| member, we don't need to expose your real world name at
| all.
|
| >It should be very difficult to keep others that you
| don't like out.
|
| No, it should be very easy to keep people out, because
| that's the fundamental mechanism behind any community,
| defining its borders and limits. That's what freedom of
| assembly is. There should be many different communities
| and they all should easily be able to set differentiated
| rules for who can participate and who can't. This is the
| basis for pluralism.
|
| A sort of free-wheeling over-connected hivemind like
| Twitter where it's either call the police or post what
| you want doesn't work precisely because it is not a
| community at all. The reason discourse has gone to hell
| is because _there literally is only one and everyone 's
| part of it_.
|
| That's why we're having a somewhat sane conversation on
| hackernews right now. Because this community is smaller,
| it's moderated, and we can to a degree escape from the
| shitstorm of mass social media. And that's only because
| the rules here are much more strict than they are on
| Twitter.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > That's not the same as having a consistent identity on
| the internet.
|
| Its effectively the same thing, for most people.
|
| If someone is only allowed to have 1 identity on the
| internet, then people would have to link it to their real
| life identity, for practical reasons. How else would
| people find me, when I want them to?
|
| Most people have a public identity, and other private
| ones. If I am only allowed to have 1 identity, then most
| people aren't going to give up the ability to have a
| public one, because there is large practical value to
| having a public identity.
|
| People only having 2 choice, choice 1 being to give up
| their public persona completely, or choice 2, having
| everything on the internet that they do, permanently
| linked to their public identity, is a horrible choice,
| that will have a huge chilling effect.
|
| > There should be many different communities
|
| Oh, if you want to participate in your own community,
| that require people to give you their government ID (Or
| crypto identity, or whatever) in order to participate,
| then I have no problem with that.
|
| What I have a problem with, is the authoritarian crazies,
| who want to take away other people's right to participate
| in the communities of their choosing.
|
| If most other people choose to participate in the normal
| internet, where most websites do not require you to have
| a singular ID, then leave us alone and let us do that.
|
| Go ahead and participate in your government ID facebook.
| (Or I guess that is just facebook already?) Just don't
| going around saying that no other communities, that value
| privacy more than you do, should be able to exist.
|
| > That's what freedom of assembly is.
|
| Freedom of assembly also includes people choosing to
| participate in communities where singular IDs are not a
| requirement, and alt accounts are allowed.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| > _No, it should be very easy to keep people out, because
| that 's the fundamental mechanism behind any community,
| defining its borders and limits. That's what freedom of
| assembly is. There should be many different communities
| and they all should easily be able to set differentiated
| rules for who can participate and who can't._
|
| Sounds like you oppose Inclusion.
|
| For your sake, I hope no one finds that controversial.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Try the same argument with something else:
|
| "Humans have always produced CO2 and cut down trees. The only
| things that have changed in past 1000 years are the sheer
| scale, speed, and cost of it."
| tomcooks wrote:
| Please let me have the last remaining bits of what used to be a
| fun wild west. Kick corporations out of the internet instead of
| making it corporation friendly.
| seneca wrote:
| Disagreed. Authenticity is incompatible with Anonymity. All the
| surveillance companies would love to tell you you can
| authenticate your identity with them and be anonymous
| elsewhere, but they, and Governments, are the exact entities we
| should be hiding out identities from.
|
| People need to be trained to be skeptical of voices online.
| darkerside wrote:
| Blockchain?
| rtkwe wrote:
| If it's cheap enough for everyone to access it's cheap
| enough for governments and companies to create mass
| accounts.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Assuming this is a genuine comment and not a troll, how
| would a blockchain solve authenticity? Never mind the fact
| that we already _do_ have a way to verify authenticity in
| the form of digital signatures. The problem is: how do you
| know the signature signer is who they claim they are? The
| best solution we have to that is the "web of trust" and
| "key signing parties"[0]
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_signing_party
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| I don't know if this comment is sarcastic and I should up
| vote for it giving a good laugh, or my second realization
| that it might be serious and I just hold my head in my
| hands.
|
| I swear I'm one step away from asking for a chili recipe
| and someone responding 'blockchain?'. It's beyond parody at
| this point - I feel like I'm in some Kafkaesque reality.
| darkerside wrote:
| A little bit of both in this case :)
| kleer001 wrote:
| I agree with your main point.
|
| > People need to be trained
|
| But, hmmm, I don't think a call for education is a solution.
| That's basically whack-a-mole. Stupid people are born every
| minute, there's no stopping stupid. Better to put bumpers on
| them and keep the rest of us safe.
| seneca wrote:
| As much as the idealists in me would like to, I can't
| disagree. How do you go about achieving that in a
| democratic society though?
|
| Misinformation is like a virus, and it spreads through a
| population easiest when they accept and share it. All that
| takes is for it to confirm some preconceived idea or to
| flatter them. Critical thinking, or at least base line
| skepticism, seems like the only inoculation.
|
| You're not wrong that that may be too much to expect from
| people though.
| freebuju wrote:
| You'll be surprised how far misinformation goes. Even among
| the non-stupid (smart?) people. Some form of Internet
| literacy needs to be done. We'll be fighting some of it
| very soon with deepfakes made by AI, and we are still not
| prepared for that.
| [deleted]
| varispeed wrote:
| Wasn't that always the case though only the medium changed? If
| you had a newspaper you could print whatever you wanted (as
| long as it wouldn't be against government or law), the same
| happens on social media only that everyone and their dog have
| their "newspaper".
| ahepp wrote:
| I like both the authenticity _and_ the anonymity of the web. Of
| course, those two things are often in substantial opposition to
| each other.
|
| The best solution I can think of at the moment is simply to not
| pay much attention to political speech on the internet.
| starclerk wrote:
| I completely agree. But it's hard, since "politics" is broad
| and almost everything touches it in some way.
|
| The main way I've tried to achieve this is by largely
| limiting what I read to:
|
| 1. Authenticated contributors, either people I know
| personally or hired by companies I trust (e.g. NYT).
|
| 2. Anonymous contributors with heavy moderation and
| filtration (e.g. Twitter, but with O(100) muted words and
| accounts. My feed is basically just art now and it's
| delightful).
|
| Again, that's hard to do. I'm still on here for instance.
| freebuju wrote:
| Interesting, so you've managed to create your own Internet
| bubble. Isn't this another example of confirmation bias?
|
| I would think it would be better to just scroll past the
| content you are not interested in engaging in. It certainly
| will be better to know of something happening, even if in
| brief terms, than to be completely in the dark of it.
| starclerk wrote:
| Totally. I'm deliberate and happy with the the bubble
| I've created. It's actually quite diverse in terms of
| authenticated sources-- the anonymous content is what's
| heavily filtered.
|
| > It certainly will be better to know of something
| happening, even if in brief terms, than to be completely
| in the dark of it.
|
| I don't think so. It's impossible to hear about
| everything and I feel whatever is newsworthy enough to
| hit the sources I read is important enough for me.
| ahepp wrote:
| I don't think there are any easy answers.
|
| If you don't filter, best case scenario your SNR is going
| to be too low. There's also a pretty good chance that you
| will end up with a GIGO situation because all you hear
| about is whatever cable news, Cambridge Analytica, and
| Amazon's twitter astroturfing squad are pushing today.
|
| If you do filter, you're correct that it opens the door
| to all kinds of biases.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >The web was supposed to be a democratizing platform
|
| It is. The problem is that democracy is messy. It means you get
| to hear from communist and qanon wackos as well as paid shills.
| Now we're pulling back on this democratization so that we have
| 'trusted' gatekeepers to tell us what we should and should not
| be exposed to.
|
| >But if there's no way to control for authenticity,
|
| And that's how it starts ...
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I don't see it as a pull-back as much as a curation.
|
| The wooly part of the Internet is still out there. But it's
| not what you're going to see in "polite conversation" as
| much, because the whole thing has passed the critical mass
| point of too much information for anyone to know. Much as
| with books before it, expect the equivalent of Reader's
| Digest to come along and a whole generation of consumers who
| are not only tolerant of, but in the market for, such
| curation.
| ldbooth wrote:
| I just got a clearly fake robocall, from "amazon" about auto
| renewing prime but my renewal doesn't come up til December.
| There is a campaign here and I doubt it is amazon. And I'm not
| renewing prime, all companies turn evil at this size.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > I feel like authenticity of online communication is an
| unsolved problem
|
| Someone else pointed out Voice.com in this space, which at
| least is trying to do it. Although if you read the fine print,
| the seem to require you to send them a "selfie", I'm not sure
| how that solves anything.
|
| https://about.voice.com/learn-more/
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| One counter-stance would be: authenticity of any communication
| is an unsolved problem. Lying, bias, cheating, misconstrual,
| forgery, libel, etc. are all problems that go back hundreds of
| years, societal rules can simply be broken for selfish reasons.
|
| The Internet has given all speech a larger platform and more
| reach, which means that both authentic and inauthentic voices
| are amplified. Maybe the inauthentic voices gain a comparative
| advantage to non-Internet worlds, since they gain more
| attention via outrage or exaggeration. Does the fault lie on
| social media, content websites, or users?
|
| So do we modify the Internet, or do we attempt to modify
| ourselves, or both?
| kleer001 wrote:
| According to a loose interpretation of Plato in The republic
| referencing the story of The Ring of Gyges anonymity basically
| ruins people.
|
| IMHO we'd need what we can't easily have, single-confirmed-
| identity-accounts for everyone. If Tim Berners Lee had been
| more of a pessimist, a historian, and a psychologist he might
| have baked in some end to end encryption with public/private
| key pairs and account centrality. But he didn't. I'm curious if
| the USA or any state power could have required an SCIA for
| everyone. Maybe it could have come from Apple? I could see some
| kinda of pre-AOL online thing being baked into MacOs, maybe.
|
| But yea, Facebook tried it and people made a fuss. We really
| kinda need it. It being a lack of wide spread anonymity for
| online personas. Invisibility really does bring out the worst
| in people.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I don't think verified identities would address the
| fakeness/authenticity problem because you could simply pay
| someone to shill with their verified account. Sure, you would
| know 'who' posted the opinion but you could never be sure if
| they were being compensated to do so. You also run into the
| issue of people being seemingly authentic with their views,
| but also being paid to promote them. Brooklyn Dad Defiant is
| a great example, he's consistent with his views, he's not
| anonymous, and he also got paid $60k by a PAC.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Neal Stephenson's latest novel deals with this a little bit.
|
| The solution he found in the book basically involved signing
| everything with your own personal identifier and putting it
| into a blockchain so everyone could verify it.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| Your comment shows how the web _is_ a democractizing platform,
| and how democracy is imperfect. Just like in meatspace, the
| winners are the people who can get the biggest crowds to
| support their ideas, not just the ideas who have the most
| supporters.
| autokad wrote:
| well here's a start:
|
| #1 - stop using the internet to gauge what popular
|
| #2 - stop using what is popular to dictate law and how everyone
| has to act.
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| Klout. I'm kind of kidding but kind of not. I agree with you
| that it's a real problem.
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| The worst is that the problem is twofold:
|
| a) You can mobilize/pay people to astroturf and create very
| vocal minorities
|
| b) You can dismiss and discredit actual movements/majorities as
| a)
|
| At the same time though authenticity (as in no anonimity) is
| also undesirable given how the companies in charge can't be
| trusted with it.
| qPM9l3XJrF wrote:
| Even assuming you can get rid of paid shills, you're still
| gonna end up with most messages being written by people who are
| extremely online.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I think that the sockpuppet problem is a manifestation of the
| larger crisis of truth. Look how, now that we've even better
| access to easily verifiable information, we still have salaried
| media professionals and politicians pushing lies about simple
| objective facts.
|
| Whatever unwritten structures that used to prevent that kind of
| thing have broken down, and it's not just social media doing
| it. Trump was a perfect manifestation of this problem - he was
| able to lie about everything and everyone in the most trivially
| contradictable ways, but faced no consequences for that.
| Instead, some professional media organizations backed him up.
|
| Only now are we finally seeing lies crest into the territory of
| legal action, and only with the most extreme cases - like the
| Dominion lawsuits.
|
| For every smaller kind of dishonesty, it seems like there is no
| consequences to brazenly lying. Anybody can lie about anyone as
| long as it's crafted such that the victim isn't in the position
| to sue (particularly if the victim isn't an individual but an
| amorphous group, and so showing standing and damages is
| functionally impossible).
|
| I mean, we've basically left it up to the social media
| companies like Twitter to enforce basic social contracts like
| "lying about a global disease in ways that encourage the spread
| of disease is a bad thing", and their users are bristling at
| that.
| taeric wrote:
| This feels written by someone that was never in a bbs scene.
| They were usually far smaller in scope, but these emergent
| behaviors were fairly clear even then. Same happened on
| prodigy, compuserve, and aol.
|
| Heck, the same mostly happens in your community center in
| really small towns, without care.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > Heck, the same mostly happens in your community center in
| really small towns, without care.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmh4RdIwswE
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Even authentic users are bullshitted into unknowingly spewing
| unauthentic bs.
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