Comments allegedly made in 2015 by Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel has some Indians understandably perturbed. According to court documents, Spiegel said that his company didn’t want to expand into India because its the Snapchat app is meant for “rich people”.
The release of the comments has since started an #UninstallSnapchat movement in the world’s second most populous country.
The revelation came after employee Anthony Pompliano filed a redacted lawsuit back in January in which part of the documents quoted Spiegel.
The parent company Snap has been fighting to keep the records sealed, but gave up last week, allowing them to be released it in the public filing.
According to the documents, Pompliano, who had just joined Snapchat from Facebook, was in a group meeting when the topic of lagging expansion abroad came up. Pompliano was trying to address the problem when Evan Spiegel allegedly cut him off.
Pompliano claims Spiegel said: “This app is only for rich people…I don’t want to expand into poor countries like India and Spain”.
Indians have been less than receptive to the characterization, though, for the moment, the Spanish have yet to strongly chime in.
On Apple’s App Store, the “Customer Ratings” of the current version of the app is ‘single star’ in India as of Sunday evening. On the Google Play Store, Snapchat’s rating dropped from 4 to 3.6.
https://twitter.com/manan_dhingra/status/853248549823291393
#uninstallsnapchat #boycottsnapchat think before you say something wrong about INDIAN pic.twitter.com/gC78MbbLxr
— Dr. Hemanth Vishwanath (@hemanth1312) April 16, 2017
Who uses this crapy #snapchat when you have #instagram stories. Never used snapchat #boycottsnapchat
— Siddhant Sahu (@iamsiddhantsahu) April 17, 2017
