Amazon reportedly went after politicians on Twitter after Bezos told executives to fight back

Amazon has suddenly been quite combative on Twitter recently, and it sounds like CEO Jeff Bezos was personally involved in the shift.

The company has been aggressively pushing back against criticism on Twitter lately, in some cases by directly going after politicians including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). With these tweets, Recode reports that Amazon leaders were following a "broad mandate from the very top of the company" to "fight back," as Bezos "expressed dissatisfaction" that officials "weren't more aggressive in how they pushed back against criticisms of the company that he and other leaders deem inaccurate or misleading."

After he did so, Amazon's "snarky and aggressive" tweets kicked into gear, Recode says. Among the most notable was a response to Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.), who criticized Amazon over workers allegedly urinating in water bottles, to which the Amazon News account tweeted back, "You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us."

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According to Recode's report, Amazon's suddenly very aggressive tweets raised eyebrows among some within the company. A security engineer reportedly even filed an internal support ticket flagging what they viewed as "suspicious activity" on the Amazon News Twitter account, noting the "unnecessarily antagonistic" tweets "do not match the usual content posted by this account." Of course, the Recode report also notes that this new Twitter tone and Bezos' directive coming amid a major union election at Amazon's warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, was probably not a coincidence.