Amazon Pays 14 Workers to Praise the Company Online

Amazon has endured less-than-glowing reports of what it's like to work at one of its warehouses. Enter the company's new "FC Ambassador" program: A number of Amazon fulfillment center employees have been put to work tweeting about how great it actually is to work at an Amazon fulfillment center, Business Insider reports. This Twitter user first pointed out the phenomenon last week, and TechCrunch followed up on it. Both speculated that the accounts tweeting cheery reports of working for Amazon were bot accounts—they all had the same "Amazon smile" as their background image, they all had "Amazon FC Ambassador" in their account name, and their bios were all structured identically, not to mention the fact that they were all tweeting things like "Did you know that Amazon pays warehouse workers 30% more than other retailers?"

But Amazon assures Business Insider the accounts are all run by real employees; BI pegs them as one- to two-year veterans of the company's warehouses who are now paid the same amount as other warehouse workers but whose full-time job is finding negative tweets about Amazon warehouse work and countering them. "The most important thing is that they've been here long enough to honestly share the facts based on personal experience," an Amazon spokesperson says. "It's important that we do a good job of educating people about the actual environment inside our fulfillment centers, and the FC Ambassador program is a big part of that along with the fulfilment center tours we provide." There are apparently 14 such ambassadors, and in addition to tweeting about compensation, they also tackle such topics as the temperature inside the warehouses and bathroom breaks—spawning the hashtag #IGoWhenINeedTo. (More Amazon.com stories.)