Snapchat is feeling the wrath of India.
Snap Inc. is getting slammed with online protests after a lawsuit claimed that CEO Evan Spiegel said the Snapchat app is “only for rich people” and that he doesn’t “want to expand into poor countries like India and Spain.”
Snap officials say the allegations, which came from a recently unsealed lawsuit by a former executive, are “ridiculous” and coming from a “disgruntled former employee.”
“Snapchat is for everyone!” a Snap spokesperson added in a Sunday statement. “We are grateful for our Snapchat community in India and around the world.”
Nevertheless, web-savvy protesters in India have posted a flurry of one-star reviews of Snapchat on the iPhone app store, dragging its overall rating down to one-and-a-half stars as of Monday.
“I cannot support an app that has a CEO who favours one country over another because of their economic progress,” one miffed iPhone user posted over the weekend, giving Snapchat one star.
In the explosive lawsuit, filed in January but unsealed last week, former exec Anthony Pompliano claims that shortly after he was hired in September 2015, he told Spiegel he could help Snapchat expand its user base in India and Spain.
“Spiegel abruptly cut in and said, ‘This app is only for rich people. I don’t want to expand into poor countries like India and Spain,’” according to the suit, adding, “Spiegel would not entertain any further discussion on the matter.”
More broadly, the suit claims that Spiegel blew off concerns raised by Pompliano that Snapchat was inflating its user stats and growth metrics in marketing materials it distributed to advertisers.
While Snapchat had been telling advertisers it was logging more than 100 million daily active users, even an “exaggerated account” of the numbers from third-party monitor Flurry peaked at just 97 million, according to the suit.
When Pompliano contacted Jill Hazelbaker, Snapchat’s vice president of communications, about the discrepancy, Hazelbaker told Pompliano that “she was aware of the issue and had repeatedly raised it internally, but Snapchat ignored her,” according to the suit.
Hazelbaker, a former Google exec who had previously worked on John McCain’s presidential campaign, left Snapchat a month later to take a job at Uber.
In response, Snapchat’s lawyers last week called the claim a “musty, two-year-old allegation about a minor metrics deviation.”
Pompliano also alleged that, while Snapchat had claimed its daily active users were growing in the double digits on a monthly basis, the real numbers were flat or up in the low single digits at best during the first nine months of 2015.
And while Snapchat had claimed its retention rate for new users was 40 percent in the first week, the real number was 20 percent, according to Pompliano, who was fired just three weeks after his hiring.