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This is all because of social media. Companies have been warning and reprimanding employees for slip ups like this way before social media, way before the internet went mainstream. My wife worked at Coca-Cola during the summers when she was in college and she was given a stern warning from someone in management when they caught her drinking a Pepsi owned product. It was a brand of juice that she didn't even know was owned by Pepsi. She didn't even know that Pepsi or Coke owned juice companies.

This Huawei/iPhone tweet was more blatant as it clearly promotes Twitter for iPhone. I can understand management's reaction, but I think they shouldn't have aired the punishments publicly. It does make them look bad.

A stern warning would have been exactly the right response to this, certainly not a pay cut. I'd be appalled if a company I worked for did this to anyone over a mistake, even a much graver one.
 
Yeah. That probably explains why Apple's co-founder Steve Wozniak was still using a Motorola RAZR instead of the original iPhone...

There was even an article about this here on this website, but there are plenty of other articles about it stored in the looooong memory of the Internet:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-co-founder-woz-sometimes-i-use-a-moto-razr-instead-of-an-iphone/

This is totally different. Woz was just saying this as a publicity stunt because he is irrelevant and trying to make headlines.

The blunders by company social media people are legit people using iPhones because they prefer them to their own companies brand. Come to think of it I’ve never seen an Apple social media account use anything but an Apple product.
 
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Got to love "advanced" nations who put employee/worker rights so low on the totem pole that they can be fired/demoted based on what phone they use to tweet from.

So greatful everyday that I live in the place I live, where such a move would be illegal.
 
It's stuff like this that makes me want to never use brands like Huawei. Not the fact they are Chinese. I couldn't care less about that.

Having said that, most companies including Apple, Microsoft and other big names would probably do the same (slightly different "punishment"); But as others have said, you'd never hear about them.

This is a huge problem for Huawei, and what started as a bit of a gaff, is now a PR disaster.

srcstc.gif

Everybody does it, but the one openly does it is the idiot, OK ... not my world anymore!
 
Just ones that are made in China? Does your bias extend to just phones or all products? Because you better rethink that stance and shrink the scope.....
Why don’t you get a cup of coffee and read my post again?
 
Aww poor Whowhy. I guess knowing that even your employees know that your phones are garbage hurts.

Apple should hire the person. :D
 
Reading the original Reuters article again, it's kind of all over the place, and my guess is the authors are piecing together conjecture. There doesn't seem to be any coherent story as to what actually happened here.

The headline reads "Chinese phone maker Huawei punishes employees for iPhone tweet blunder". So these are presumably Huawei employees, right?

But wait… "The mistake occurred when outsourced social media handler Sapient experienced “VPN problems” with a desktop computer so used an iPhone with a roaming SIM card in order to send the message on time at midnight, Huawei said in the memo. [..] Sapient did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent via the contact form on its website. Calls to its Beijing office went unanswered."

What?

So was the actual author of the tweet a Sapient employee, not a Huawei one?

  • But then what were any Huawei employees doing at all? Were they demoted for picking Sapient as a contractor?
  • Why does Sapient need a VPN? They are headquartered in the US. Is this referring to a VPN from Sapient Beijing to Sapient Boston? Or perhaps did the Huawei employees get a Sapient VPN in order to tweet? Or did a Sapient employee get a Huawei VPN to get marketing information?
  • "A roaming SIM card"? What, so someone went on an airplane to a different country just to use Twitter? And then after all that trouble, they chose the wrong phone from which to send the tweet?

Something doesn't add up.
 
And until now nobody ask Twitter to remove such useless information attached to every tweet. While this feature still there this is not gonna be a last incident and Apple will be ripping this free publicity.
I never really got why that type of information would be in a tweet anyway. What's the point? And why does it need to be included?
 
There are so many incidents like this. It is definitely amusing to see. I think that the companies should ask twitter to make it an option to display such information. (not sure this is already a case as I don't use twitter).
 
I never really got why that type of information would be in a tweet anyway. What's the point? And why does it need to be included?

It’s included because the app that communicates with Twitter needs to authenticate.

You can revoke an app’s access to your account individually. They all have their own token. It’s also a way to detect bots.
 
It’s included because the app that communicates with Twitter needs to authenticate.

You can revoke an app’s access to your account individually. They all have their own token. It’s also a way to detect bots.
I can see it as being part of authentication or validation (essentially internally), not sure why that's something that needs to be displayed with the tweet itself.
 
Student of Mandarin / Chinese language here. There are characters for "cutting off someone's kneecap for punishment" and "cutting off someones feet for punishment". Better not mess with the management in China.
 
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