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The meat of the story is that Omaha man worked for Marriott hotels on customer support. Their support system allows their agents to like tweets. The man appear

• chrischen 9y ago
  Yea it's weird I feel like liking the tweet should pale in comparison to whoever listed Tibet as its own country. Seems like the mistake was listing tibet as a country on the survey and they fired a guy just because he put attention to it by liking a tweet (and was thus used as a sacrifice). If I were China, I'd probably demand the firing of someone more consequential than a random minimum wage worker who had little to deal with the insult in the first place.
  • lostlogin 9y ago
    If you were in China would you really find it insulting that Tibet is considered by some to be its own country? It was invaded, and I can’t really see any other way to characterise what happened.
    • chrischen 9y ago
      That depends if you think some Americans would be offended if you claimed Hawaii was its own country. It was also invaded and then forcibly gentrified and colonized. That's not to even mention the entirety of the United States. It's not so much if China has legitimate claims on Tibet so much as it's the pot calling the kettle black. The greatest conquerer on Earth and its modern beneficiaries telling another country to give up territory and sovereignty.
      • Turing_Machine 9y ago
        "That depends if you think some Americans would be offended if you claimed Hawaii was its own country." Do you have an actual example of someone being fired for claiming that Hawai'i was its own country? Edit: apparently you don't. Your analogy does not hold water.
        • ndespres 9y ago
          I think the Hawaii example was rhetorical, but you can find examples of Americans being fired for supporting BDS movement or speaking against Israel occupation of Palestine, we even have laws against doing business with BDS supporters in some states. So we do evidently care enough about these sorts of disputes to make laws about them.
          • Turing_Machine 9y ago
            "I think the Hawaii example was rhetorical" And my point was that it was a very poor analogy. "we even have laws against doing business with BDS supporters in some states" Link? I see some laws against state governments doing business with those companies, but nothing that says that a private business (like Marriott) has to fire supporters of that movement, nor do we have laws that prohibit those companies from doing business at all.
            • chrischen 9y ago
              US government banned contractors using China-manufactured electronics. You can make up all sorts of excuses about how it’s for national security, but from the otherside it looks like the US is simply unfairly preventing a Chinese company from competing in a foreign market that it has not natural entitlement to. Whether or not the reasons for it are true, the reality is it has real financial consequences for Chinese electronics companies, even if they are fully legitimate and with good intentions. Thus it’s an example of how the US is potentially using political power to suppress foreign influence. Here is a link for your convenience too: https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/12/us-government-agencies-zte-huawei/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/12/us-government-agencies-zte...
    • jonathanyc 9y ago
      As an American, I wouldn’t be offended if a Chinese person suggested that all non Native Americans should leave America. I wouldn’t think that would be reasonable, although I would acknowledge that we could do much more to help rectify the situation that still exists today. I would likewise be not offended (but might feel slightly uncomfortable) if someone told me that California, my home state, should be returned to Mexico. But do you really think it is so unrealistic that many Americans would be offended by such a statement? Let’s not pretend it is somehow surprising that people might be very insulted by being told what they consider part of their country should be returned, especially by foreigners.
      • Turing_Machine 9y ago
        "But do you really think it is so unrealistic that many Americans would be offended by such a statement? " You can't control whether someone is offended. You can control whether you fire someone because someone else is offended.
        • jonathanyc 9y ago
          > If you were in China would you really find it insulting that Tibet is considered by some to be its own country? This is the GP I am replying to. I don’t believe the employee should have been fired.
        • prepend 9y ago
          You can control whether you respond to someone being offended. There’s a very long tail for offense and companies (and individuals) can work to recognize that responding to someone feeling offended (or claiming to) should be rare. Although it’s hard to differentiate when 100 people tweeting #imoffended is just 100 people or 100 people part of 1 million.
      • mirimir 9y ago
        There are activists who argue that all of the southwestern US should be returned to Mexico. And indeed, the idea generally isn't that unpopular in Mexico. For what that's worth.
    • lopmotr 9y ago
      It's not insulting. It's a threat to their sovereignty. It's comparable to if lots of map makers changed the borders of the US to give Texas to Mexico, and it was acknowledged by international companies operating there and it was taught to kids in school. Eventually, by massive popular belief, it would be nearly impossible to retain it under US control because everyone would think it's obviously part of Mexico, including vtoers. Of course there's no risk of that happening in the US so they don't have to police it. For recently taken territories though, the position is weaker and easier to lose, so the new owners have to control the popular belief about whose it is.
    • coldtea 9y ago
      So what's your stance on Hawaii and Puerto Rico? Or for that matter, Florida, Texas, Florida, California, New Mexico, and Arizona? Or for that matter the whole of the US land where Native American tribes lived.
      • craftyguy 9y ago
        Texas, after revolting and winning independence from Mexico, chose to join the US after a short jaunt as an independent nation. The rest, yea, pretty much forcefully taken in one way or another.
        • coldtea 9y ago
          Seems like this was the Mexican's mistake: "In the hopes that an influx of settlers could control the Indian raids, the bankrupt Mexican government liberalized immigration policies for the region. Finally able to settle legally in Texas, Anglos from the United States soon vastly outnumbered the Tejanos. Most of the immigrants came from the southern United States. Many were slave owners, and most brought with them significant prejudices against other races, attitudes often applied to the Tejanos. Mexico's official religion was Roman Catholicism, yet the majority of the immigrants were Protestants who distrusted Catholics"
  • RenegadeEagle 9y ago
    Thank you for saying this. I was so confused. Like why is this guy responsible for this? It was someone obviously higher up who added Tibet as its own country...
  • gowld 9y ago
    The Chinese Communist Party (note: this is not "China") doesn't demand firing of anyone. This is just Marriott's way of sucking up to the Chinese Communist Party and management dissociating themselves from their mistakes
    • rootusrootus 9y ago
      It's purely Marriott's way of being jerks. They could just as easily have said they fired someone and then left it at that, there was no real need to actually fire the guy.
    • ascorbic 9y ago
      > The Chinese Communist Party (note: this is not "China") doesn't demand firing of anyone. If you believe the article, that is literally what they did.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • jewelry_wolf 9y ago
    I'm from China and I do. The answer is in the culture for over two thousand years that the country is better to be under one ruler so less war between countries fighting each other. Probably still better to have one ruler to fuck up the citizen before any modern democratically system stabilized.
  • fiblye 9y ago
    The mistake was letting people who don't accept that Tibet is its own country send death threats to you and kowtowing to them. It's enabling their bullshit.
• Declanomous 9y ago
  I totally believe "the UI sucks argument" as well. I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally liked something on Instagram because of the stupid double tap a photo = like, not zoom feature. Instagram is a piece of software millions of people use every day. I've designed software that 5 - 100 people use a day, and I can tell you the UI is going to suck if you have a data architect design the UI for your CRUD application. I'm sure the UI sucked on Mariott's app, I'd bet my life savings on it.
  • banned1 9y ago
    This happens if I am watching a video on twitter, think I am in YouTube, and double tap on the right side to fast forward. Bam, I just liked a video of some ANTIFA beating the shit out of people! Now how do I unlike that?
  • whoisjuan 9y ago
    This happens a lot on the reddit mobile app. Sometimes I'm just browsing and out of nowhere I see an orange upvote or a purple downvote that I likely trigger just by scrolling to the comments. It also happened to me once or twice that I was looking at the Facebook profile of someone and then 2 hours later I got a notification saying that that person accepted my friendship request. Somehow I mistakenly sent those requests. At least for the latter, I've always thought there should be some impedance to avoid this. Like slide to send request or some other small friction interaction.
  • Corrado 9y ago
    I've actually had this exact problem with Instagram. 1. My teenage daughter shows me picture of a girl she knows but doesn't like. 2. I don't have my glasses so I double-tap to try to zoom in a bit. 3. My daughter screams that the girl now knows that she was looking at her picture. 4. I quickly double-tap again to un-like the photo. 5. My daughter glares at me because she knows that the damage is already done. In fact, I can relate to the guy in the original story. Fortunately, I only earned my daughters short lived wrath and didn't lose my job.
• forapurpose 9y ago
  > My kneejerk is to believe fired man I think that frames the issue incorrectly. The question is, whether he clicked it intentionally or not, he should not be fired for saying something the government of China dislikes (much less clicking like on what someone else said). China should not be extending censorship to Omaha.
  • gowld 9y ago
    He didn't even say anything! He showed the tiniest possible amount (1 bit!) of support for his employer's action
• cylinder 9y ago
  The real story is he has no employment rights because he's in America and he's "at will." They can dismiss him because they don't like his lunch selection that day and he has no rights. That's at will employment. This type of situation plays out all over the country everyday.
  • JPKab 9y ago
    It gets abused for sure, but more often, businesses get to fire bad employees, and this means they are more likely to give some people a chance who wouldn't get one otherwise. Hiring in certain countries is very risky, because it is so costly to fire a bad employee.
    • ixacto 9y ago
      Bullshit. It is 100% advantage for the employee. Another employee and myself got laid off with 2 days notice from my former employer when they decided they were going to try to use less people. This is really annoying since I now am working as a temp for 6mo until I'm hired at another company and have to pay $400/mo out of pocket for insurance. This is in the biotech industry not the tech industry, maybe things are better there.
      • fouc 9y ago
        you mean for the employer?
    • banned1 9y ago
      Which is why many companies don’t hire many people in France http://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/knowledge/publications/147348/ten-things-to-know-about-labour-and-employment-law-in-france http://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/knowledge/publications/14...
      • John_KZ 9y ago
        This is also why people in France have stable, long-term jobs, instead of being fired by Wallmart every 6 months due to some war veteran scheme that allows them to save 0.1% on employee salaries. In this particular case, if the man wasn't trained appropriately to handle international PR while doing so, the wrongdoing lies with the company. The article itself seems to adopt a certain attitude that I really dislike. For one, I don't believe that the employee clicked accidentally. It really sounds like a lie. Then the arguments alternate between "it's not my job" and "Why should we care about China/other countries? Why should just tell them to f-ck off!". The truth is that both the US and the company seem to have an opinion. The employee, either due to negligence or ignorance, broke that line, and the company faced a backlash. It's not like China is exceptionally evil or something. I hate people trying to vilify entrire countries and politicize everything. It sounds like the author is just looking for a reason to bash China.
• astura 9y ago
  >Another question does occur - if it's such a big deal for them, why is/was Tibet listed as its own country in their system that prompted the liked tweet in the first place? The survey was outsourced to an outside company. >And even in this specific case, where a low-level Marriott employee in Omaha clicked “like” on a tweet thanking Marriott for a survey designed by a third-party vendor, the hotel chain got in big trouble. Marriott clearly has zero training on geopolitical issues so the third party vendor didn't have a template to follow, likely they just Googled "list of countries in the world" and copied the list. Marriott needs to be providing a list of countries to all outside vendors.
  • incompatible 9y ago
    "Country" is a loose concept anyway. A country isn't necessary a sovereign state, since places like England or Aruba are considered countries. If it wasn't for the whole offending China thing, few people would care if Tibet was classified as a country or as a "historical region", as Wikipedia has it.
• conanbatt 9y ago
  Even in a purely profit-driven mindset, as a Marriott executive in a pinch on this decision, I would give a sizeable severance and thats it.
• pasbesoin 9y ago
  Sometimes, your service to the company consists of being thrown under the bus. The older I get, the more I find the prematurely cynical people I grew up around had it half-right. And the naively, or ignorantly, or cluefully -- I still don't quite know which -- happy people I grew up around, had the other half of that right: Do your own thing, enjoy it as much as you can, and walk away from the negativity. Maybe if we could do enough of the latter, places like Marriott would never get the traction to step all over their employees. As for China, well, I'm a bit older. The people I met who got over here from China, tended not to go back. Take that as you will.
• wdr1 9y ago
  It sounds like Marriott wanted to be in a position to say someone had been fired, and he was offered up. Either way, pretty shitty on Marriott's part.
  • snarfy 9y ago
    It should have been the guy that allowed all low level employees access to the official Marriott twitter account.
    • __david__ 9y ago
      Or maybe not fire anyone and just ignore silly twitter temper tantrums.
      • ptaipale 9y ago
        I understand that this was not just a twitter tantrum, but a major disruption of business: inability to book online in China, in fact causing huge losses.
    • tyingq 9y ago
      Surely they are using some overlay tool (tweetdeck, etc) instead of direct Twitter access. The tool should have limited or used some approval process for "likes" if that was viewed as risky.
    • ddeck 9y ago
      >It should have been the guy that allowed all low level employees access to the official Marriott twitter account Where in the article did it say that all low-level employees have access to the official Twitter account? The employee in question had access because it was literally his job to reply to customers on their official Twitter account: The Marriott customer care manager intended to spend his eight-hour overnight shift doing what he always did: helping hundreds of Marriott customers around the world as they shot complaints, questions and reward-point requests to the hotel chain’s official Twitter accounts
• PakG1 9y ago
  I don't think it was such a big deal for them until China told them that that it was a big deal and punished them accordingly until they fixed stuff according to China's liking. Everything that happened after (including firing the guy) is just fallout to clean up an issue that they didn't predict, and they're taking steps to do what China wants (like not listing Tibet as a country anymore) in order to keep operating there. Simplest answer is often the best answer. If the survey had never happened with Tibet as a country, the tweet would never have happened, and then the whole scenario would never have come to light. It's easy to predict this in hindsight. I honestly think people didn't think about this in the past. Whether or not it's right is an entirely different question.
• emodendroket 9y ago
  Are we really expecting social media employees to be familiar with and adept at geopolitics?
  • mistermann 9y ago
    Not kissing China's feet in this case could have cost Marriot many millions of dollars, so yes. Welcome to the future of humanity, I guess we'll see if everyone is so casual about this type of thing when it's them who crossed the petulant monster child the West has created.
    • emodendroket 9y ago
      Well, if it'll cost Marriott so much money that they're concerned about it, perhaps they should be hiring someone with more such knowledge at a higher salary.
• muzani 9y ago
  "If liking a tweet will infuriate the largest (by population) country in the world, maybe $14/hr support agents shouldn't be able to one-click like tweets. Another question does occur - if it's such a big deal for them, why is/was Tibet listed as its own country in their system that prompted the liked tweet in the first place?" > I really hope this doesn't become the moral of all this. It's two very rare mistakes in a row. One listing Tibet, which actually got noticed. Another was the misclick, which also got noticed. But it would be extremely costly if we suddenly had a confirmation dialog on low level employees liking tweets, or if every form drop-down needs to be approved by senior management.
• Rapzid 9y ago
  I can't help but feel the real problem here is China. Those death threats and angry tweats were likely coming from China employed shills. Such a ticking time bomb the CPC.
• B-Con 9y ago
  > If liking a tweet will infuriate the largest (by population) country in the world, maybe $14/hr support agents shouldn't be able to one-click like tweets. I think this is the most pragmatic thing mentioned yet. Social media accounts are a real-time, globally visible way to communicate with the world. Treat it with respect. If you care about subtle mess-ups then have a review system or something. I'm guessing the ideal PR person running the account is: * educated in how that platform works (aka, young and social media savvy) * experienced in the plethora of ways PR can go wrong (or well for that matter). "I know this looks innocent, but it's best to remain quiet on issues of X", for example. and I'd guess that's a sweet spot that's probably hard to fill with one person.
• throw7 9y ago
  The real story is how web forums are the worst way to converse with real people all across the world. How can we at least get back to the NNTP type of control we had in the 90's? HN is teetering on failure, and I'd just like to get back to NNTP? :(
• kitd 9y ago
  > Another question does occur - if it's such a big deal for them, why is/was Tibet listed as its own country in their system that prompted the liked tweet in the first place? Even worse is that the listing came from a 3rd party survey firm. The employee is paying the price for what was ultimately them fouling up.
• HenryBemis 9y ago
  And let this be a lesson to EVERYONE who works in Marriotts. This is the very definition of "throwing under a bus". This is how fast Marriott (in the US of A) will throw you under the first bus that comes by. This is how Marriott respects the individuals and has the capacity to handle a sensitive situation.
  • HillaryBriss 9y ago
    yeah. and I can't help but think that pretty much any US corporation doing business in China will throw employees and a whole lot more under the bus if they're told to do so in order to retain market access. is this consistent with the meaning of "free and open access"?