Man working running social media accounts for a large company “Likes” a tweet mentioning the company. China doesn’t like the tweet and complains. Man is fired. The tweet mentioned Tibet as a separate country rather than as part of China. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Chinese authorities cited advertising violations in several of the recent cases including Marriott’s. Marriott emailed a survey to rewards-program members asking them to specify their home country. The options included Tibet, Macau and Hong Kong—all part of China—and Taiwan, which is claimed by China but has its own government. The survey was prepared by a longtime Canadian vendor.
Chinese social media began lighting up with outrage over Marriott’s survey on Jan. 9. The next day, Mr. Jones was on the night shift handling the Marriott Rewards Twitter account, a job that required him to engage with the public on Twitter.
Mr. Jones said his team noticed calls on Twitter to boycott Marriott but hadn’t been briefed on what was happening.
That night, a tweet from a Tibetan separatist group praising Marriott for listing Tibet as a country in its survey was liked by Marriott’s official Rewards account.
Mr. Jones said he typically reviewed up to 300 tweets a shift and doesn’t recall liking that one, although he concedes he probably did.
On Jan. 11, the Shanghai Municipal Tourism Administration said it questioned Marriott representatives over the matter and ordered the company to publicly apologize and “seriously deal with the people responsible.â€
Marriott was also forced to suspend online booking services for one week in Greater China, its largest market outside North America with nearly 300 hotels. Following the episode, Marriott said it terminated its contract with the Canadian vendor.
Mr. Jones said he was fired after a Marriott human-resources director interviewed him about the incident.
It’s the sort of thing that would make me want to boycott Marriott.
The official position of the U. S. government is that Tibet is a part of China but they hedge by expressing a desire for the matter to be handled democratically and amicably by the government of China and the people of Tibet. If you move enough Han Chinese into Tibet, you can certainly make it de facto a part of China. The same could be said of Zimbabwe.
Yeah, makes me want to boycott Marriott too, not that I stay in hotels that often.
US companies need to be cautious about getting on their knees to service China’s hypersensitivity.