A former Apple employee claims in a recent lawsuit that the company punished him for approving an app critical of the Chinese government.
Reason reports that a former employee of tech giant Apple claims in a recently filed lawsuit that the company punished him for approving an app critical of the Chinese government in order to appease communist authorities in Beijing. Trieu Pham worked as an app reviewer for Apple and made his claims in a discrimination and wrongful termination suit filed at the Santa Clara, California, Superior Court in December 2019.
In the complaint, Pham claims that in 2018 he was criticized by his managers at Apple for approving an app by Guo Media as it was “critical of the Chinese government.” Guo Media is a website run by Guo Wengui, a Chinese businessman who has been exiled to the United States and is currently wanted by authorities in Beijing on charges of economic crimes. Wengui has previously made allegations about major corruption at the highest levels of the Chinese government.
Pham alleges that after they filed an internal discrimination complaint in September 2017, managers at the company conducted a review of Pham’s performance and gave him a “Documented Coaching Plan,” which included reviews that were allegedly completed incorrectly. The plan claimed that Pham’s most serious error was approving the Guo Media app which was forbidden in the Chinese version of Apple’s App Store. Read more…
