Amazon reportedly ended its "FC Ambassador" program, which paid warehouse employees to tweet positive messages about working conditions at the company's fulfillment centers.
"Amazon quietly shut down and removed all traces of the influence campaign at the end of last year," people with direct knowledge of the decision told the Financial Times, as reported by Ars Technica. The program, the FT said, suffered from "poor reach and embarrassing backfires."
More than a dozen Twitter accounts, run by real on-the-floor staff, were first spotted in 2018; all 14 featured the Amazon smile logo and the same "FC Ambassador" title in their bio. The in-house diplomats, as Business Insider reported at the time, were regular members of staff whose job it was to share favorable experiences working at a fulfillment center.
Now scrubbed from the social network, the promotional accounts routinely promoted standardized messages of positivity, praising the working environment and denying negative statements about folks peeing in bottles.
"The 'ambassador' program was always a laughable attempt to minimize the abuses unfolding inside Amazon warehouses," Warehouse Worker Resource Center executive director Sheheryar Kaoosji told the Financial Times. Amazon did not immediately respond to PCMag's request for comment.
Following a brief stint as a viral sensation, Amazon's FC Ambassadors worked mostly under the radar, until a historic unionization effort at an Alabama warehouse reignited the flame—in the form of parodies. According to a 2021 article by Vice, Twitter suspended a number of Ambassador accounts, some of which may have been real, but plenty of others that were created by trolls to confuse people.