Report: Amazon's Social Media Turned so Aggressive that Security Staff Worried Accounts Had Been Hacked

A recent report reveals that Amazon’s own security staff internally flagged recent antagonistic tweets from the company as “suspicious,” and believes that the company’s Twitter accounts may have been hacked.

The Intercept reports that after Amazon’s official public relations account tweeted a number of tweets taunting public officials, security staffers were so surprised by the accounts “unnecessarily antagonistic” tone that one security engineer filed a suspicious activity report, believing that the company’s social media account may have been hacked.

Amazon’s official “Amazon News” media relations Twitter account recently 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.

On Friday, an Amazon security staffer reportedly filed a report referencing the Twitter account which stated:

These tweets are unnecessarily antagonistic (risking Amazon’s brand), and may be a result of unauthorized access by someone with access to the account’s credentials.

The tweets in question do not match the usual content posted by this account, and doesn’t seem to match the quality careful wording, and doesn’t report the same source-label (the offending tweets all report ‘Twitter Web App’ instead of ‘Sprinklr’).

An internal Amazon correspondence log sent to The Intercept showed that the security staffer was told that the tweets were “not a technical issue,” stating: “I got details from [redacted] that this is [an] ongoing PR issue and does not require any technical support. PR leadership are aware of it.”

One anonymous Amazon employee told The Intercept: “It basically got sent into a black hole. Just resolved as no issue.”

The Intercept writes:

But company personnel think Amazon’s aggressive actions on Twitter are “embarrassing.” “A lot of folks thought the account was compromised due to those rants,” one Amazon employee told The Intercept. The provocative tweets enumerated by the report — perhaps best described as “snotty” by Sen. Elizabeth Warren — include the reply to Pocan, insisting that no one would work for Amazon if drivers had to use urine bottles; the reply to Warren, telling her, “You make the laws…we just follow them”; and several replies to a critical news article in The Guardian, which it brusquely called “fiction.”

…

“Finding out that the tweets are real is embarrassing and contradicts Amazon’s leadership principles they pride themselves on,” an Amazon employee told me. The company’s internal “PR Social Tenets” include: “No self inflicted wounds: we assess every communication thoroughly and have systems in place to ensure that we will not cause damage to Amazon’s reputation,” according to a copy of the document obtained by The Intercept.