The Story

“Not only can’t you speak freely inside of China, but you can’t even speak freely outside of China — and that’s really bad.” — Xiao Qiang, a Chinese internet expert at the University of California at Berkeley.

Roy Jones worked over nights handling the Marriott Rewards Twitter account making $14 per hour. He’d generally interact with the public, looking over about 300 tweets per working night.

In January, Jones clicked like on a random tweet he didn’t even remember that would result in his termination.

Jones didn’t realize it, but a few days before the Marriott sent out a survey asking its customers where they were from. They have some 300 hotels in China, so the data could be helpful. Some options on that survey listed Tibet, Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

The first 3 are part of China, but were listed separately. Taiwan isn’t recognized by China at all. So, the survey was taken as a political statement. These statements were viewed as a threat by China and violated one of their new cyber security laws. According to the Wall Street Journal:

“Under a cybersecurity law that went into effect last year (2017), any person or organization is banned from posting content that ‘endangers national security, national honor and interests’ or ‘incites subversion of national sovereignty’ in China.”

The Wall Street Journal also points out that the Chinese government hires small armies of online recruits to search the net for violations of these laws. Even though Twitter is banned in China, somehow Jones’ like was spotted.

The Chinese government forced Marriott to cancel online bookings for a week in response. They also ordered the hotel to publicly apologize and deal with those responsible.

Marriott responded by firing the Canadian marketing company that designed the survey and for good measure, canned Roy Jones. China is a big market for Marriott, so they took the threats from the government seriously.

Foreign companies deciding to kowtow to the Chinese government over speech or advertisements isn’t exactly new in that market.

China has aggressively monitored advertisements since another censorship law was passed in 2015. Since this law was passed, Chinese sensors have deemed 230,000 advertisements illegal. At one point they shut down an ad from Mercedes Benz that quoted the Dalai Lama.

However, someone in the United States getting fired over liking a tweet is something entirely new. Well, it was until that point in 2018.