Huawei has a reasonable explanation for the disappearing Twitter photos

Huawei has denied its phones automatically delete photos saved from Twitter. The Chinese tech giant was forced to issue a statement after rumours emerged last week from customers who had seen suspicious notifications.

In a statement, Huawei attributed the issue to a quirk with two specific builds of the Twitter app, along with the image-protection system that’s built into its Huawei EMUI software. Here’s the company’s statement in full:

So, in short: this was a massive nothingburger. No pictures were permanently deleted; they were just moved to a separate location on the phone’s file system. This inadvertently caused a feature in EMUI to show a notification, which made users panic and think the worst.

What’s interesting about this particular incident, however, is that it’s pointed a spotlight on the suspicion many people in the West hold towards Huawei.

There’s a perception that Huawei is extremely close to the Chinese state — or is even an extension of it. It’s therefore not a surprise that many think it would seek to implement China’s aggressive domestic censorship policies on its phones.

Except in this case, it didn’t. And while it’s useful to hold most tech companies with a healthy air of suspicion, this knee-jerk Chicken Little paranoia does nobody any favours.