Why Is India Boycotting Snapchat?

Indians have lashed out at Snapchat after the company’s CEO allegedly said he didn’t want to expand into poor countries “like India and Spain.”

The alleged remarks were part of a lawsuit by a former employee of Snapchat, who worked at the company for three weeks before being fired. In the lawsuit, the employee claims after he raised concerns Snapchat wasn’t being widely used in India and Spain, CEO Evan Spiegel said the app was “only for rich people.”

“I don’t want to expand into poor countries like India and Spain,” Spiegel allegedly said.

Snapchat has approximately 4 million users in India and has denied the allegations, describing them as “ridiculous.”

“Those words were written by a disgruntled former employee,” the company said in a statement. “We are grateful for our Snapchat community in India and around the world.”

Indian Snapchat users took to Twitter to express their outrage, and #boycottSnapchat and #uninstallSnapchat were trending over the weekend. Disgruntled users also appear to have flooded the app with one star reviews.

If u are getting bored on this Sunday do this👇👇👇#boycottsnapchat pic.twitter.com/oyExF1ZeGA
— 👻🙈🙉🙊👻 (@IRASPD) April 16, 2017
Larger social media companies have had a tough time cracking the Indian market, and Snapchat – whether its CEO made the remarks or not – will rue this incident as a major setback. Facebook is constantly striving to increase its Indian audience, and previously introduced a free internet access program to boost those efforts, only for the Indian government to ban the service over concerns the mission was to secure more customers rather than help connect the country.
New nottification while deleting @Snapchat in India #boycottsnapchat pic.twitter.com/cNSEL18UAT — Roshan (@TekiRosh) April 16, 2017

About the author

Peter Ward

Tech Editor

Peter was born in Birmingham, England and was raised in North Wales. He studied journalism at the University of Sheffield before moving to Dubai, where he worked for several business magazines. After three years in the Middle East, Peter moved to New York to earn his master's degree in business journalism from Columbia University Journalism School. He has since written for international publications such as Bloomberg, The Economist and Newsweek. In his spare time Peter loves to play and watch soccer, go to the movies, read, and play video games.