Tag: amazon

Amazon Mocked For Providing Employees Dystopian ‘Mindful Pods’ To Take Mental Breaks In

The pods are sitting on the warehouse floor (presumably so slave workers don’t have to stray too far from their stations) waiting for mentally and physically shattered drones to enter when they need to scream, cry or… look at a bonsai tree.

Inside the chilling despair pod there is also a computer that, Amazon says, allows workers to “navigate through a library of mental health and mindful practices to recharge the internal battery.”

One can only imagine what kind of monstrous cringe is contained within.

This adds to the litany of other reports of Amazon employees being treated so poorly that they are literally killing themselves.

“They treat us like disposable parts,” an anonymous writer, who worked at an Amazon fulfillment center, wrote in an article published by The Guardian last year.

The employees say they are tracked everywhere they go (which has increased with COVID measures) and punished if they dare to stop working at any time.

Drivers have reported that they have to piss in bottles because they cannot take sufficient breaks to empty their bladders. Amazon dismissed the claim, then walked back the dismissal after it was revealed to be true via internal documents that proved the company was chiding employees for “public urination” and even “public defecation.”

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Amazon’s Ring is the ‘largest civilian surveillance network the US has ever seen’ with one in ten police departments using video from doorbell cameras, warns security expert

Amazon’s Ring doorbell camera ‘is effectively building the largest corporate-owned, civilian-installed surveillance network that the US has ever seen,’ it has been claimed.

The stark warning came from Lauren Bridges, a PhD candidate at University of Pennsylvania, who told The Guardian that one in ten police departments around the country have access to video from the civilian cameras after the company partnered with more than 1,800 local law enforcement agencies.

Bridges raises serious concerns that cops are able to request Ring videos from members of the public without a warrant, which she claims is deliberately circumnavigating the Fourth Amendment – the right not to be searched or have items seized without a legal warrant.

Last year alone, law enforcement agencies filed 22,337 individual requests for Ring videos, according to data compiled by Bridges.

A report in the California Law Review claimed that Amazon even assisted and coached law enforcement on how to circumvent legal requirements—such as the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. 

The claims are supported by ‘scripts’, obtained by Vice in 2019 from the Topeka, KS police department, which tell police how to encourage users to share camera footage with police and encourage friends to download the Neighbors app.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, nonprofit organization for ‘defending civil liberties in the digital world,’ has even formed petitions calling on Ring to end its partnerships with law enforcement agencies. 

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Amazon Used Sophisticated Social Media Disinfo Campaign to Attack Labor Advocates, Promote Jeff Bezos

The tech giant Amazon has been recruiting social media trolls to plant disinformation on social media in a sophisticated campaign that denigrated labor advocates and promoted globalist oligarch Jeff Bezos.

The program, codenamed “Veritas” by Amazon brass, was started in 2018 but became particularly influential during a recent labor dispute in Alabama. Amazon was using disinformation from the troll campaign to crush a unionization attempt in the state.

An internal document has been leaked detailing how the scheme was plotted by company executives.

“To address speculation and false assertions in social media and online forums about the quality of the FC [Fulfillment Center] associate experience, we are creating a new social team staffed with active, tenured FC employees, who will be empowered to respond in a polite—but blunt—way to every untruth. FC Ambassadors (‘FCA’) will respond to all posts and comments from customers, influencers (including policymakers), and media questioning the FC associate experience,” the document read.

The corporate-backed Twitter army has been particularly rude toward socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who has urged for Amazon workers to organize to gain additional benefits from the world’s richest and most powerful man.

“This job has never made me feel bad personally. If you have a job that makes you feel bad, you could leave,” said one Amazon troll regarding Sanders.

“Everyone should be able to enjoy the money they’ve earned/saved. It’s theirs. They should be able to do with it as they please. That includes Jeff Bezos,” another bought-off troll stated.

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‘Mein Kampf’ and Other ‘Hate Speech’ Products You Can Still Buy on Amazon

Amazon, the popular online retailer, is under fire after conservative author Ryan T. Anderson announced on Sunday that his 2018 bestseller, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, had been scrubbed from the Amazon website.

The decision to ban the book from its platform came several months after Amazon quietly altered its content guidelines to prohibit the sale of “content that we determine is hate speech … or other material we deem inappropriate or offensive,” which includes content that “promotes the abuse or sexual exploitation of children, contains pornography, glorifies rape or pedophilia, [or] advocates terrorism.”

As recently as August 2020, Amazon’s content guidelines for books were significantly vaguer, asserting the company’s right to prohibit the sale of “certain content, such as pornography or other inappropriate content.” Amazon has yet to offer a sufficient explanation of the updated guidelines.

In the meantime, Amazon continues to permit the sale of numerous books that most casual observers might reasonably classify as “hate speech” or are otherwise incompatible with its updated content guidelines. The company also continues to sell other products that would appear to run afoul of contemporary standards of wokeness, as outlined in its prohibition on selling items (excluding books) that “promote, incite, or glorify hatred.”

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Amazon quietly ends sales of books it labels ‘hate speech’

Sometime before this week, when it removed from its digital shelves a book critical of transgender ideology, Amazon altered its content policy to explicitly forbid books that promote “hate speech,” a major rule change that could be used to rationalize action against a broader range of books sold by the digital retail giant.

Amazon this week yanked “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement” from its main web store, its Kindle servers and its audiobook lineup with no explanation, even as the book had been available on the site for three years with no apparent controversy. 

In the 2018 book, author and political philosopher Ryan Anderson draws on years of scientific research and data to criticize the prevailing approach to transgender issues in modern medicine. The book “exposes the contrast between the media’s sunny depiction of gender fluidity and the often sad reality of living with gender dysphoria,” according to its sales blurb. 

Anderson told Just the News that he had received no explanation for the ban.

Reached for comment by Just the News, Amazon declined to provide any explanation, offering instead a link to its book content policy. 

A review of those policies suggests that sometime in the last few months Amazon made a major change to the ways in which it moderates book content on its servers, imposing a much stricter standard on books than it had previously done. 

The link provided by Amazon this week claims in part that, where books are concerned, the company “[doesn’t] sell certain content including content that we determine is hate speech … or other material we deem inappropriate or offensive.”

Internet archives show that as recently as August of last year, Amazon’s book content policy did not include any mention of “hate speech.” At that time, the company stated only that “we reserve the right not to sell certain content, such as pornography or other inappropriate content.”

On the older page, the company directed users to “guidelines for other categories of products,” such as products featuring “offensive and controversial material.” That policy stipulated in part that Amazon “does not allow products that promote, incite or glorify hatred,” but the rule explicitly noted that the policy did not apply to books. 

The company did not reply to a followup query asking when the policy had been changed, and why.

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