How Amazon Bullies, Manipulates, and Lies to Reporters

A juicy read.

More proof that communism doesn’t go far enough.

It was a slow news day at Gizmodo, the tech website where Dell Cameron worked. Without a story of his own to report he decided to aggregate—a journalism term for rewriting and crediting—a day-old Tampa ABC-affiliate’s TV piece on how Amazon’s Ring home surveillance security system was being marketed to dozens of Florida police departments.

A day later, an email from an Amazon spokesperson popped into Cameron’s inbox. The brief email claimed that the Tampa-based reporter, Adam Walser, was “correcting his story” and suggested that Cameron would need to do so as well. In her mail, the spokesperson challenged the accuracy of the station’s entire report. “It is inaccurate that AWS or Amazon is marketing Amazon Rekognition to law enforcement, either individually or in combination with Ring,” she wrote.

Cameron checked, and he didn’t see a correction on the Tampa story. Before making any change to his post, Cameron decided to reach out to Walser and double-check. “I read him the exact email that they sent me,” Cameron says. Walser was puzzled, according to Cameron. “He said ‘That’s just not true, we’re not issuing a correction. I don’t know what they’re talking about.’” Cameron wrote back to the Amazon spokesperson relaying what he’d been told, and mentioning that Gizmodo was planning their own potential follow-up story that was “likely to include that Amazon attempted to obtain a correction from Gizmodo by falsely claiming the ABC station was planning to issue one.”

“I do not believe for a second that this person is naive or didn’t understand what a correction is,” Cameron told me recently, almost two years after the interaction. “They got a job in the PR department at one of the most powerful companies in the world. I think they were trying to trick me into correcting a story and didn’t expect me to go back and contact the reporter.”

Silicon Valley seems to be above morals and above the law. Certainly above paying taxes.

Then come the revolution they will get it first and worst.

These people have zero accountability. And here I thought the banks had it easy.

In the past 20 yrs, I've only spent about $175 on amazon.com

Are there any Amazon critical articles in WaPo?

About as many as ABC has articles critical of Disney, R11.

...Okay? Corporations are shady as AF news@11. MEANWHILE, I ordered a charger for my phone and got it the next day.

You could have gone to a store and got it the same day. But by all means, destroy the planet so you don’t have to waddle down the block.

Trash company

r14 Delusional; and so tiring that dlers pretend that there are no people with sociophobia and other on dl. And all men who are buying groceries and drugstore on site are being discriminated against.

It might be better for you to stay home after all.

R14 Is that right? At least I'm not a hypocrite. Let's not pretend that everything YOU do is for the "betterment of the planet."

Twat.

[quote]Robinson’s “article references people collapsing, which is not something we recognise,” as though the company had somehow gained a monopoly on reality.

Bleak

Aren’t there other ways to order stuff at home?

Is there really no competition to Amazon? Seems un-american.

Huh R17? A man who built his company from the ground floor to a billion-dollar industry--on the backs of foreigners and cheap laborers--is un-American? Why, there is NO better example of good-ole capitalism than the Jeffrey Bezos story. Not to mention dumped his wife, got fit, and started banging models. THAT'S America, baby.

Can't wait for the scathing, unauthorized Lifetime movie about it.