Girls Named 'Alexa' Blame Amazon for Their Bullying

Girls with this name are yelled commands at in school as if they were their classmates' servants.
Girls Named 'Alexa' Blame Amazon for Their Bullying
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Entrepreneur Staff
2 min read

"Alexa" is the name of Amazon's virtual assistant, which has become a meme trend in the last year. When Bezos announced that he was leaving Amazon, many parents reported that their daughters named Alexa are being bullied because they share a name with the virtual assistant. Some parents even decided to rename their daughters to avoid harassment.

To annoy them, kids yell "Alexa!" followed by a command, causing laughter among classmates and teachers alike. One of the mothers of the girls who suffered bullying says that in addition to changing her name, she had to remove her six-year-old daughter from the school because students were also bothering her a lot, and the institution did not take it seriously.

Related: Everything You Can Do With Amazon's Alexa

According to the BBC, there have been complaints since 2014, the year the virtual assistant began operating. Amazon has been asked to change the name of Alexa to something other than the name of a real person, like the operators of Apple and Google called Siri and Catana. Even a mother in Massachusetts started a campaign called "Alexa is human" to make people see that it is a real problem. Even if the boys do it as a joke, they end up treating their peers as if they were their servants, and that causes many trust problems for the girls who are teased.

Amazon has apologized for these problems, but has not changed the name. The company said that it wanted to reflect the values that it considers important in a person, and that is why it decided to make the name more human. 

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