The boss of China’s Twitter – who only worked there just over 8 months – quit. With a tweet.
Kathy Chen, who was brought in by Twitter Inc. to run Greater China back in April 2016, resigned from the popular social media company over the weekend.
While Twitter has been blocked by the Chinese Communist Party since 2009, many still find access to the site using VPNs (virtual private networks). And stranger still, even with the Chinese government’s extensive internet censorship, state-run entities like Xinhua News use Twitter to reach audiences abroad.
This is where Kathy Chen comes into play. Ms. Chen, who previously worked at tech giants Microsoft and Cisco, was hired to usher in more Chinese advertisers to Twitter.
And she explains that she did just that. In one of her 12-part tweets over the weekend Chen claimed that Twitter grew its Greater China advertiser base by nearly 400 percent, making it “one of the firm’s fastest growing revenue markets in Asia Pacific (APAC)”, Reuters reported.
The tweet Ms Chen sent announcing her resignation read: “Now that the Twitter APAC [Asia Pacific] team is working directly with Chinese advertisers, this is the right time for me to leave the company.”
Ms. Chen added that the rumored-to-be-closed Hong Kong office, in which she is based, would remain open “for now”.
