Snapchat Denies “Poor India” Comment by CEO Evan Spiegel

Snapchat, the multi-million-dollar app has been in the wrong news lately with its CEO Evan Spiegel’s alleged distasteful comments like “not to expand to poor countries like India” and “Snapchat is only for rich people”. These comments have caused a major backlash throughout India after the news broke on twitter and other social media sites.

The news created havoc across India when Snapchat’s Ex- Employee Mr. Anthony Pompliano revealed that Evan Spiegel was not at all interested in expanding to poor markets like India. Pompliano met Evan in a meeting and they were discussing about Snapchat’s global outreach and expansion. Pompliano was interrupted and was told by Evan that he does not want to expand to poor countries like India. The allegations are contained in pompliano’s lawsuit, filed at a US court in January this year.

However, Snapchat’s parent company Snap Inc. wrote off and denied the comments and said that Pompliano knows nothing of Snap’s current metric. Snapchat, the self-destructing image sharing app is based out in Los Angeles, California and has over 500 hits in the google play store. It is particularly popular among teenagers. The app was developed by three Stanford university students Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown.

This news is trending in twitter with trends such as #boycottsnapchat making the rounds. Just last month, Snapchat made the news with huge profits of 24 billion dollars through Initial Public Offering. Snapchat became the only app to do so since Facebook in 2012. It has become massively popular among teenagers since the last couple years. It is predominantly used for dating.

Snapchat also suffered a mammoth loss in its ratings which dropped down to one star in the app stores after the “Poor Country” news came out. Snapchat would be better off apologizing or acknowledging the issue as it has hurt the sentiments of the people.