Employees at Huawei punished for tweeting via iPhone

The Chinese smartphone manufacturer, Huawei has reportedly punished two of its employees for posting a tweet on Huawei’s official Twitter account via iPhone. The tweet contained a simple straightforward message wishing new year to its fans across the world. The now deleted tweet said, “Happy #2019” message, this was followed by the small signature below the tweet which said “Twitter for iPhone”. This small signature means that the person who tweeted this did it by using an iPhone.

While many perceived this as a silly mistake Huawei, however, has taken this mistake as a serious offense against their brand reputation. Many people took screenshots of that tweet and subsequently used it for making jokes and puns directed at the Chinese giant. The company took disciplinary action against the two employees who were responsible for this mistake. Reuters was able to get its hand on an internal Huawei memo dated January 3rd, which stated that, “the incident caused damage to the Huawei brand.”

However, the circumstances surrounding the incident tells a different story, it is no secret that Twitter is banned in China, so in order to use the popular social media platform, companies use a VPN to do their social media advertisement. The VPN is typically set on a computer for the marketing team to use. However, on December 31st the employees reportedly faced some sort of issues with the VPN as it was not working and the only other way to post the tweet was through a smartphone with a SIM sourced from a Hong Kong carrier since Twitter isn’t banned in Hong Kong and well everyone knows the rest.

Huawei made an example of two of its employees who were responsible for this blunder, the employees were demoted by one rank and their monthly salaries were reduced by $728.27 USD. Furthermore, the pay rank of one of Huawei’s digital marketing director was frozen for 12 months. These punishments may seem harsh but considering the escalation of economic war between USA and China, with Apple and Huawei being the top-tech companies from each country, this was highly likely.

Furthermore, Huawei recently announced that it will reward employees who will replace their iPhone with a smartphone which is made in China, this move was in response Huawei’s CFO being arrested in Canada on USA’s orders. With USA encouraging its allies to ban Huawei products from their respective countries, let’s see how 2019 treats the ever-growing Chinese giant.