It's not a good day to be Amazon in India. After a recent report by Reuters cited some internal Amazon documents to allege that the e-commerce giant's strategy to dodge Indian regulators. The report said that two more sellers on the e-commerce giant's India platform – merchants in which Amazon had indirect equity stakes – accounted for around 35 per cent of the platform's sales revenue in early 2019. It means some 35 of Amazon's more than 400,000 sellers in India at the time accounted for around two-third of its online sales.
Following this alleged revelation, Amazon was on the receiving end of severe backlash on social media. In addition, the Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) has called for a ban on Amazon, claiming that the findings of the Reuters report are reason enough to bar the US-based e-commerce giant from conducting its operations in the country.
The claim
Amidst all this, several users on Twitter came out in support of Amazon India, but there was just one problem. All of these users retweeting Amazon's defence statement to the Reuters report had the same language, word by word, drawing some serious suspicion.
As pointed out by a Facebook user, who is a communication consultant, there were several users who appeared to have copied and pasted the same tweet in support of Amazon India. Check out the screenshots shared by Karthik Srinivasan below:
For anyone to guess, this looks like Amazon India took a page out of BJP's IT cell playbook.
Fact check
International Business Times had reached out for an official response on the alleged coordinated outpour of support by Amazon India or the PR team.
"Amazon did not have any involvement in any coordinated response on social media to our tweets on the Reuters story. Last evening we noticed unusual activity on our India Twitter handle and immediately flagged the same to Twitter teams in India and US to investigate these profiles and accounts," Amazon India spokesperson told International Business Times in an email statement.
IBTimes also reviewed the emails sent to Twitter team flagging off the suspicious activity to further confirm that the e-commerce giant had no part in it.
However, the user who shared the original post highlighting the activity also cited a few Amazon PR executives to deny any role from the e-commerce brand. In fact, Amazon did not initiate this exercise on social media, but there's no clarify currently on how it went viral.
Our sources have also confirmed that Amazon India had no role in the activity, but we'll update the official statement in this regard as soon as we hear from the brand.
