Why are Indians boycotting Snapchat? Everything you need to know

People mistakenly uninstalled Snapdeal instead of Snapchat

Snapchat  has been in the news for all the wrong reasons over the weekend ever since CEO Evan Spiegel allegedly claimed that he is not interested in expanding the platform's user base in 'poor countries like India and Spain'. 

This lead to a huge uproar in India, especially on social media forums. People not only ridiculed Snapchat for the remarks but also began a boycott campaign on Twitter and began to uninstall the app on their phones. Here is what exactly happened.

According to a report published in Variety, the CEO while discussing expansion plans in a meeting allegedly dismissed an employee's concern of the slow growth rate of the app in India, stating that the app was only meant for 'rich people'.

As reported earlier, According to one of the employees, Spiegel had during a meeting said, "This app is only for rich people. I don't want to expand into poor countries like India and Spain." It is rumoured that this comment was made by Spiegel in 2015.

After reports of Spiegel's alleged claims of Snapchat being a 'rich people's app' surfaced,  Indian users took to Twitter to express their dissent over the comment. 

Hashtags like #BycottSnapchat and UnistallSpachat were trending on Twitter.

Soon after Variety published the alleged comment, the app's ratings on Google play store and other such platforms witnessed a sharp decline, a 4.4 to a 3.6 rating. Furthermore, the number of one-star rating by the users shot up from 39,102 to 192,906 in just 24 hours.

Others took action on the Apple App store, driving the ratings of the App to one star and bombarding it with sarcastic reviews.

Interestingly, Snapdeal had to face the heat of this controversy. It was reported that many Indian users, in the wake of this controversy, uninstalled Snapdeal instead of Snapchat by mistake.

According to a report in Economic Times, Serial entrepreneur K Ganesh said that even if the comments were true, every company had the right to choose its markets and chart its own course. “If, in their wisdom and assessment, India is not a core market for whatever reason, that is completely the company’s prerogative. It is not a charitable organisation that they have to serve the world. On that, I don’t think we should take offence,” said Ganesh. 

Snapchat has 158-million daily active users globally and over half of them are outside the US.

According to a report in India Today, Anonymous Indian hackers claim to have leaked database of 1.7 million Snapchat users, which they hacked last year in retaliation to Snapchat's CEO Evan Spiegel's remark.

Hackers said that they had found the bug earlier but never used the data but "arrogance" of the Snapchat CEO had miffed them. They have further threatened to carry out intensive strike against company on the virtual world till the CEO apologies for his remark, reported India Today. However, Snapchat has not confirmed any successful hack and leak yet.