A few analysts blamed the drop ? worth more than $12 billion ? on a strike of 4,000 Chinese workers at Apple's manufacturer.
But how do we know that strike really happened?
Bloomberg's Adam Minter makes the case that the entire narrative is based on messages posted to China's version of Twitter, Sina Weibo, from a single anonymous user.
His best evidence: The organization that got the news in the headlines is a group called Chinese Labor Watch. Minter did little research and found that while Chinese Labor Watch says it got its information from "workers," it's press release was mostly cribbed from the tweets of just one person.
On October 5, this user, who goes by the name "Ye" wrote this message:
?A preliminary explanation for today?s quality control personnel strike: Some time ago a conflict broke out between K?production line?staff and quality control, leading to fights and the smashing up of quality control?s CA room, with many employees injured and hospitalized. It didn?t end there. K line once again got into a similar situation, and again quality control got a beating. Yesterday, there were once again physical threats between the L line and quality control. This was reported to senior managers, who ignored the seriousness of the problem. As a result, today?s day and night shifts have decided to stop production, the production line is paralyzed??
The same day, Chinese Labor Watch put out a press release with this paragraph, full of the same details structured in a very similar way:
?That quality control inspectors would also strike is of no surprise. According to workers, there was a fight between workers and quality control inspectors in area K that led to the damage in inspection room CA, the injury of some people, and the hospitalization of others. After this, another similar incident occurred in area K, once again leading to quality control inspectors getting beat up. Yesterday, inspectors in area L received physical threats. When inspectors reported these issues to factory management, the management simply ignored and turned their back on the issue. For these reasons, all day and night shift inspectors carried out a work stoppage today that paralyzed the production lines.?
The worst thing about all this is that, eventually, Ye caught on to what Chinese Labor Watch was doing, and complained that it was exaggerating everything he'd said about strikes, which his employer, Foxconn, still denies ever happened.
Milton's got a lot more detail, and he raises some pointed questions about the way everyone covers Apple.
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