
Facebook employees caught leaving 5-star Amazon reviews for Portal - Osiris
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-employees-caught-leaving-5-star-amazon-reviews-for-portal-2019-1
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restingrobot
This happens at any company with any product. Really being blown out of
proportion because its facebook.

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drugme
_This happens at any company with any product._

Can you name a few examples?

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Justin_K
Remember the whole Ray's Pizza fiasco?

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drugme
Sorry, I'm not a Ray's person. Can you recap?

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crb002
Grey area. I could see someone who actually used it leaving a rave review, but
still sketchy by not saying that in full disclosure they got to beta test.

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ken
The "Facebook -- Head Of Supply-Chain & Strategic Sourcing AR/VR Products"
prefixed his review with "I have historically not been a big Facebook or other
social media user". Does anyone believe that? I would describe this situation
as more than merely an omission.

It's also against Amazon's rules for customer reviews, disclosure or not. It's
no gray area. It's the first example of a prohibited activity, under
"Promotions and Commercial Solicitations".

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jstarfish
> Does anyone believe that? I would describe this situation as more than
> merely an omission.

Do tobacco executives smoke?

Astroturfing is such an amateur move, I fully believe he's unfamiliar with
social media-- else he'd understand the implications of getting outed.

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perl4ever
You hear this sort of thing a lot.

If someone wants to deny an accusation they say "of course it wasn't me,
because I would never do something so amateurish".

And if they do not choose to deny it, they say "of course it was not
intentional, because I would never have been so obvious if it was".

The thing about these comments is that one or the other can virtually always
be used regardless of the malfeasance conditional on whether denial is
possible. So they do not usually provide a reason to doubt the accusation.

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colejohnson66
Web Archive link to bypass anti-ad blocker:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20190118191620/https://www.busine...](http://web.archive.org/web/20190118191620/https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-
employees-caught-leaving-5-star-amazon-reviews-for-portal-2019-1)

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swampthinker
3 employees were, after being explicitly told by Facebook not to do so.

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drugme
_after being explicitly told by Facebook not to do so._

That's not what the article said.

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traek
It literally is quoted in the article from Facebook's head of VR/AR:

> neither coordinated nor directed from the company. From an internal post at
> the launch: “We, unequivocally, DO NOT want Facebook employees to engage in
> leaving reviews for the products that we sell to Amazon.” We will ask them
> to take down.

[https://twitter.com/boztank/status/1085966442820886528](https://twitter.com/boztank/status/1085966442820886528)

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drugme
You're right, it does.

What happened was I skimmed the article looking for support of what you said,
and didn't find it initially. But then again, my eyes tend to blur when
reading BI articles.

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pram
The portal is a very nice piece of hardware. I would have bought it with
little hesitation if it wasn’t tied to Facebook. Oh well!

