The Happy New Year
message was marked with “sent via Twitter for iPhone” and was quickly seized
upon by users who spotted it.
Chinese tech firm Huawei has demoted two employees after an iPhone was
used to send a Happy New Year greeting from its official Twitter account.
The message wishing Huawei followers a “Happy #2019” on New Year’s Day
was marked with “sent via Twitter for iPhone” and was quickly seized upon by
users who spotted it.
Although the tweet was swiftly deleted, screenshots of the post spread
across a whole host of social media platforms, including blogging site Weibo.
In an internal memo sent out on Thursday, seen by Reuters, Huawei
corporate senior-vice president Chen Lifang said the mistake had “caused damage
to the Huawei brand”.
The error happened after the firm Huawei uses to outsource its social
media pages experienced “VPN problems” with a computer and so used an iPhone
with a roaming SIM card to send the tweet in time for midnight, the memo said.
VPNs – or virtual private networks – act as a secure tunnel between
devices, allowing users to send and receive data across public networks as if
their computing devices were directly connected to the private network.
As Twitter is banned in China, anyone in the country wishing to use the
site would need to use a VPN connection.
Huawei tasks marketing company Sapient with handling its presence on
Twitter and other social media websites, many of which are blocked in China.
Neither firm has responded to requests for comment, but the memo
revealed that two employees had been demoted and had their salaries reduced.
The pay rank of one of the staff – Huawei’s digital marketing director –
will also be frozen for 12 months, it said.
It is not the first time the use of iPhones has caused embarrassment for
Huawei, which overtook Apple as the number two smartphone maker in the world in
2018 despite being completely locked out of the US market.
Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of nationalistic Chinese tabloid Global Times,
was mocked last year after he used an iPhone when expressing support for Huawei
and domestic peer ZTE Corp.
He later said his actions were not hypocritical as foreign brands should
not be discriminated against. - Skynews
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