For years, Amazon has been taking heat for conditions in its fulfillment centers, where labor activists say employees are chronically overworked. These criticisms seemed to be reaching a tipping point around last month’s Prime Day, when Amazon faced intense pressure from union organizers, Democratic politicians and even some employees—including Minnesota warehouse workers who went on strike, wearing shirts that said, “We are human, not robots.”
Amazon has been attempting to address the negative perception of its fulfillment centers through a variety of methods, with most rooted in the opportunity to let just about anyone come visit one for a tour.
But when one skeptical Twitter user expressed doubts this week about Amazon’s transparency, she ran afoul of the ecommerce giant’s social media “ambassadors,” who describe themselves as real fulfillment center employees who’ve been asked to share their (usually positive) experiences at the company.
Then things got truly weird.
When the woman, who lists her name as Diana Wilde on Twitter, began to respond, different ambassadors would then step in to answer. The result was an eerie exchange that ended up looking like one person talking to a robotically rotating litany of cheerful Amazon advocates.
Or, as Wilde put it in a tweet that quickly became the scenario’s calling card, “i feel like im talking to the borg.”
Here’s what happened to make her feel like she’d been targeted by a dystopian cyborg army:
It began when she responded Wednesday to an Aug. 1 post by the @AmazonNews PR account, offering to help arrange fulfillment center tours. She was underwhelmed by the offer.
She then got a response from an “Amazon FC ambassador” (FC standing for fulfillment center) named Dylan, based at a facility in Pennsylvania, though he clearly failed to win her over.
So in stepped Rafael, an Amazon FC ambassador in Kent, Washington:
Rafael has tweeted about 1,500 times and follows zero accounts, which is admittedly odd Twitter behavior for the average user, but his tweet history seems to show a legitimate human, albeit one clearly tweeting under corporate oversight. Several observers of his conversation with Wilde noted that in 2018, Rafael’s name seemed to be Michelle, but he waved off the bot allegation by noting that he’d inherited the account from another user (and presumably changed the name to reflect his).
But when Wilde responded with a question to Rafael, she got a response…from ambassador Audra.
So Wilde asked Audra a question, and got a response from ambassador Cindi.
This pattern continued, with Cindi being followed by Brittany, Brittany followed by Rachel, and Rachel followed by Carol, with a few more visits from Brittany and Rafael along the way. (You can scroll up and down through the full thread here.)
By this point, the bizarre thread of rotating ambassadors was getting enough attention that it began to spawn fake ambassador accounts, mimicking or mocking the “everything is fine” tone of the official accounts. But all the embedded responses above seem to be from legitimate Amazon ambassadors.
Adweek reached out to Amazon about the Twitter thread and the thinking behind the ambassador program. Here’s Amazon’s official response:
“FC ambassadors are employees who work in our FCs and share facts based on personal experience. It’s important that we do a good job educating people about the actual environment inside our fulfillment centers, and the FC ambassador program is a big part of that along with the FC tours we provide. This year alone, more than 100,000 guests have come to see for themselves what it’s like to work inside one of our FCs. If you haven’t visited, I recommend it.”
