A recent report from Recode states that e-commerce giant Amazon’s recent social media posts targeting Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) came after CEO Jeff Bezos angrily told executives that they weren’t pushing back hard enough against criticism of the company.
Recode reports in an article titled “Amazon Started a Twitter War Because Jeff Bezos Was Pissed,” that Amazon’s recent tweets harshly criticizing Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were the result of a new mandate from company CEO Jeff Bezos to fight back harder against criticism.
Recode reports:
Recode has learned that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos expressed dissatisfaction in recent weeks that company officials weren’t more aggressive in how they pushed back against criticisms of the company that he and other leaders deem inaccurate or misleading. What followed was a series of snarky and aggressive tweets that ended up fueling their own media cycles.
The timing was likely not coincidental. Bezos and other Amazon leaders are on edge as the company is facing the largest union election in its history at its Bessemer, Alabama warehouse. Election results will be tallied early this week, and Amazon officials understand that if a majority of the employee voters vote to unionize, it could set off a chain reaction at other facilities, with the potential to force the e-commerce giant to overhaul how it manages its hundreds of thousands of front-line US workers. There was terror inside the executive ranks of Amazon the last time a union election was held at a US Amazon facility — and that was only a small subset of a warehouse’s workforce, the majority of whom voted against unionization. That vote happened in early 2014, and consisted of just 27 technicians and mechanics at an Amazon warehouse in Delaware. In Alabama, though, the stakes are much higher with nearly 6,000 workers eligible to vote. Bezos knows all of this well.
So when news broke last week that Sanders was planning to visit Alabama in the final days of voting, top Amazon executive Dave Clark fired off a Twitter thread that started with the following post.
“I welcome @SenSanders to Birmingham and appreciate his push for a progressive workplace,” Clark’s account posted on Wednesday. “I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that’s not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace.”
Notably, the official “Amazon News” media relation Twitter account made headlines when it pushed back against well-documented allegations that Amazon workers have been forced to urinate in bottles due to the company’s strict working schedules. Breitbart News has reported extensively on this topic and the response to Amazon’s tweet.
Read more at Recode here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.