How much credibility do you put in such testimonies though? Especially if everyone is a "anonymous source", you can basically invent just about anything and publish it and pretend for it to be a genuine article without any fact under the hood.
Tell me, how well did that go for Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning?
Pyramid of trust:
- cited sources
- anonymous sources
- off the record sources
A corporation is composed of people who are paid to do a specific job, with an interest in keeping said job by making decisions and doing tasks towards a central goal, a corporation generally behaves vastly more rationally for any given scenario. Furthermore, the particular structure of the corporation which determines the actions directly affects the corporation survival, where historically poorly structured corporations that end up with scandals tend to last a very short time.
So with Amazon, considering it has survived for quite some time, and additionally with all the optics it has on it from any political entity or person trying to score popular points by being "anti-big-corporation", Id argue that this decision to fire was likely made after much collaboration with higher level execs and legal involved, well understanding what the consequences would be, including attention at reviewing their privacy compliance.
If not from whistleblowers, which have a long track record of being persecuted extensively and subjected to very personal and very damaging retaliatory attacks if not for anonymity, then in your eyes what warrants questions?
Was the journalist approached by a co-ordinated group of three former Apple high-level security execs in order for them to Greenwald&Snowden-style inform the public, themselves openly inviting massive career risk (even when "anonymous"), with real skin in the game and thus with real credibility worthy of maybe oh even up to government investigation?
Or did this journalist have a python script that emailed every single public address of all ex-employees of every BigTech corp, looking for responses, robotically fishing out clickbait headlines that harbour the feintest enough outline of what integrity might look like?
Obviously, there's a wide range between these two extremes, including Real Investigative Journalism that oftentimes co-ordinates the investigation itself. But, that is extinct, and since provenance is not established well in the article, my default is, assume the worst, in every case. Yes, literally, bots wrote this article, it means exactly nothing. Fugazi.
