Amazon started a Twitter war because Jeff Bezos was pissed

Vox

Amazon has long been at odds with Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) over their criticisms of the company’s labor and business practices. But the discord reached new heights last week when Amazon aggressively went after both senators on Twitter in an unusual attack for a large corporation. With each new snarky tweet from an Amazon executive or the company’s official Twitter account, insiders and observers alike asked a version of the same question: “What the hell is going on?”

It turns out that Amazon leaders were following a broad mandate from the very top of the company: Fight back.

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 employees vote to unionize, it could set off a chain reaction at other facilities — potentially forcing the e-commerce giant to overhaul how it manages its hundreds of thousands of frontline 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.