Huawei Punishes Employees For Tweeting From iPhone
Huawei has cut the pay of two of its employees after an iPhone was used to send a New Year’s greeting from the company’s official Twitter account.
According to both Reuters and Bloomberg, Huawei's corporate senior vice president Chen Lifang wrote in an internal memo that the incident had “caused damage to the Huawei brand.” In addition to the demotion and a 5,000 yuan (around $728) monthly pay cut, the January 3rd memo said that one of the employees would also see their pay rank frozen for 12 months.
The memo says that the incident occurred after its external social media agency, Sapient, experienced “VPN problems” with its PC. VPNs allow access to Twitter from inside China. As a workaround, an iPhone fitted with a foreign SIM card was used to send the tweet. The Huawei memo notes that “the incident exposed flaws in our processes and management.”
Last year, Samsung Nigeria had to delete over 300 tweets that were sent from an Apple device, while celebrities including Gal Gadot and Indian actress Anushka Sharma have been caught tweeting ads for Huawei and Google, respectively, from competitor’s phones.