There are two ways to get your employees to have happy internal chat groups. The first is obvious: make your workplace a fair and happy place, where employees naturally speak positively about their working conditions.
The second is to block negative or pro-union words from the employee chat. Say something negative, and your post doesn’t go up.
Amazon workers on Staten Island just won a union vote, even after Amazon spent $4.3 million on anti-union consultants in 2021. Amazon, understandably, wants to prevent another unionization effort. This is not the way to go about that. Here’s why.
to keep reading, click here: Leaked Documents: Amazon to Ban “Slave,” “Living Wage,” and “Unfair”
The Intercept is sensationalist click bait on a part with British tabloids, but without the topless women on page 3.
Banning the word “harassment” may be an accident since it contains the word “ass” (synonym for donkey). It’s called the “Scunthorpe problem” after a town in England. You can see where it comes up based on letters 2-5 of the name “Scunthorpe”. It’s where ordinarily “dirty” words are hidden in legitimate “clean” words.
It’s an app that’s under development (and may well never be deployed), and this is a list of words being used to train the filters. The developers who came up with it probably either thought “this will be funny” or were venting their own frustrations with their employer, and never had any intention this list would ever be used when (and if) the app was released. I seriously doubt anyone at a management level was even aware there *was* a list used for testing, much less what’s on it.
It’s even possible this is a list they’re using to test the filters because it was handy, but it’s actually intended as a *white* list of words that *can’t* be filtered. There’s no way to know.
This is nothing but click bait sensationalism, reported by a web site that’s pretty much all click bait sensationalism.
I’m not willing to accept without verification these “leaked documents” even exist, much less what they say, and there’s certainly no context to them.
Talk about making stuff up. The Verge, for example, verified the basics of the story. Now, the app has NOT yet launched, and now Amazon is saying that if the app does wind up launching most of those words won’t actually be screened.
But they admit that the app was being developed and do not even hint at the idea that there might have been a whitelist.
Once again, management probably has no idea of the details of the process to develop the app.
And nobody at any level is going to go into much detail with a journalist (or have any idea what the process is anyway), and no web site “news” source is going to accurately report it if they did.
We have no idea what’s going on, but it is *very* clear that there is no reason to believe this app, if it is ever deployed, will include these filters. This entire non-story is sensationalist click-bait, and nothing more.