Why Indians made a decision to boycott Snapchat and troll Snapdeal

The controversy was created when a former employee of Snapchat claimed that Snapchat’s CEO does not want to expand operations to India since it was a “poor country”. After an alleged statement released from Snapchat’s CEO Evan Spiegel, thousands of India users, who were active on this mobile application, have uninstalled the application from the android and ios mobile phones and now #BoycottSnapchat has over 24,000 tweets. The former employee mentioned the exchange from a September 2015 meeting he had with Spiegel about the app’s worldwide growth plans.

According to one of the employees, Spiegel had during a meeting said, “This app is only for rich people”. Snapchat described him as a “disgruntled employee fired for poor performance”. The 26-year-old billionaire who founded Snapchat took his company public.

However, Snap – a company known primarily for its short-lived messaging concept – denied that Spiegel had ever made such statements, calling the reports “ridiculous”.

“This app is only for rich people”.

Indian users upset over disparaging remarks allegedly made by Snap Inc.

The incident marks the latest event in which a company’s reputation has taken a hit because of an employee’s poor choice of words.

Anonymous Indian hackers claimed that they’ve leaked the data of 1.7 million Snapchat users which they hacked previous year. Instagram is now presently used by more than 200 million users, which are more by 50 million since January stats. A majority of Indian citizens, are teenagers and young adults, that makes the potential mobile users in the country over 350 million – close to the entire population of the United States. As a result, thousands of people have uninstalled the app while clamoring through #BoycottSnapchat and #UninstallSnapchat for others to do the same.

Snapchat not only has a small user base in India but also the company has been struggling with a viable monetization plan for the social media platform.

Snapdeal, incidentally, seems to have been an unintended victim as it was confused for the social media app and received quite a few downgrades.