Deleting Snapdeal over Snapchat CEO’s comment shows India’s ‘hurt pride’ is a joke
#BoycottSnapchat trending on Twitter because Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel had managed to outrage an entire country because of a 2015 comment of his led to unforeseen consequences. Hundreds of enraged Indians ended up uninstalling Snapdeal while also downrating it on the App store.
Hilarious as it may sound, the confusion of a self-proclaimed digital powerhouse and its failure to distinguish between Snapdeal and Snapchat even as it trends #UninstallSnapchat and #BoycottSnapchat on social media, is really where the “hurt pride” of Indians should stem from. Alas, it’s not the case.
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| Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel. |
Snap it, zip it
Typical Indian overreaction and hyperbole over a two-year-old casual racism by an over-entitled tech billionaire, who uttered the words “poor country” and “India” in the same sentence, not only betrays a chip in our once colonised shoulders, it’s equally embarrassing that a similar sounding Indian e-tailer had to bear the brunt of India’s “hurt pride”.
Irony just laughed out loud and made the laughing-till-you-cry emoji in giant fonts and possibly with a Snapchat filter.
As thousands of miffed Indians lashed out at Snapchat by uninstalling Snapdeal, we saw screenshots of national humiliation flooding social media.
Meanwhile, The innocent child got some punishment due to his twin brother. #boycottsnapchat #Snapchat #Snapdeal pic.twitter.com/trFmlPYHJW
— Virat Kohli (@TedhiBaat_) April 16, 2017
Majority of Indians instead of deleting and giving 1 star rating to @Snapchat started to delete @snapdeal ????What. A. Nation. pic.twitter.com/60i3xfEAb1
— عادل (@aurAdil) April 16, 2017
Some Indian dumbasses are rating SnapDeal app 1 star instead of SnapChat. #BMKJ pic.twitter.com/ZcXiFqNCRU
— Madhu Menon (@madmanweb) April 16, 2017
Boycotting Snapdeal instead of Snapchat is the equivalent of slapping Arbaaz Khan because you're angry with Roger Federer.
— Sahil Shah (@SahilBulla) April 16, 2017
So what does this mean?
Quite simply, Indians are a bunch of overwrought zealots who cannot hit back with wit and humour, but have to act like ignorant but bloodthirsty pack of hounds to cause more national embarrassment. Our standard operating procedure whenever we feel “offended” is to bludgeon the opposition with even more virulent desi versions of negative stereotyping and #BharatMataKiJai.
Even Evan Spiegel's fiancee, the supermodel Miranda Kerr's Instagram account was flooded with abusive comments on the Snapchat CEO's once-upon-a-time brush with racism. This is purebred desi misogyny that decides to hit back at the nearest female soft target when it has to attack a man.
Just like Saakshi Dhoni was trolled because she was upset that husband MS Dhoni's Aadhaar enrollment details were divulged by an overenthusiastic volunteer, Kerr was virtually targeted in the choicest of expletives directed at her fiance because Indians wanted to settle scores with the Snapchat CEO.
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| Miranda Kerr's Instagram account was flooded with abusive comments from offended Indians. |
Bandwidth bubble
Consider, for example, some hard facts when it comes to Digital India and the real reason why India has only four million of Snapchat’s 158 million daily active users worldwide.
Despite the exaggerated claims of companies like Reliance Jio, Airtel and Vodafone, truth is that India is still lagging behind in bandwidth and last-mile connectivity issues. The high-speed data war between Jio and Airtel is really about who miffs off its users less by offering free data packs, instead of high quality service catering to heavy duty mobile downloads and uploads.
However, in the “Risks Factor” section of Snap Inc’s (Snapchat’s parent company) SEC filing, “poor internet connections” are a valid concern:
“In addition, because our products typically require high bandwidth data capabilities, the majority of our users live in countries with high-end mobile device penetration and high bandwidth capacity cellular networks with large coverage areas. We therefore do not expect to experience rapid user growth or engagement in countries with low smartphone penetration even if such countries have well-established and high bandwidth capacity cellular networks. We may also not experience rapid user growth or engagement in countries where, even though smartphone penetration is high, due to the lack of sufficient cellular based data networks, consumers rely heavily on Wi-Fi and may not access our products regularly.”
And even though India has over 600 million smartphone users, most are low-end Android phones which cannot support a heavy-duty, data-consuming app such as Snapchat, which relies on big video uploads and downloads, constant streaming and filters in its Story section, and many other features which make it a high-bandwidth application.
Unlike WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook, which have managed India’s 2G and 3G networks, because they are mostly text-based, Snapchat is a video-intensive app which needs top-notch 4G services to run smoothly. Little wonder then that Snapchat remains confined to a section of young and affluent mobile users who have iOS, don’t conserve data but can afford to download and upload unlimited amounts of it, as well as different priorities from the kind of social media base that Indians generally have or prefer.
Hence, in hindsight, Evan Spiegel’s comment might have been racist, but the concerns behind it were statistically valid. Moreover, it must be noted that the revelations by a disgruntled ex-employee Anthony “Complaino” Pompliano are part of an ongoing lawsuit and hence their veracity cannot be determined until the matter is settled.
Even then, it could be argued that Spiegel’s outlook to digitally exploding “poor countries” such as India is warped at best, because this is where the future is – whether of bandwidth or of market expansion. Snubbing India wasn’t a sound financial decision by Spiegel, his knockout start-up is showing much slower growth than the company wants us to believe, if Pompliano’s allegations are anything to go by.
‘India First’ in self-embarrassment
Any kind of mob behaviour in the name of hurt sentiments and patriotism should be automatically suspect, but when it starts impacting an India-born tech giant such as Snapdeal, we know that the #BoycottSnapchat movement was misguided. Do we have to reciprocate by doubling up the reverse racism quotient and end up messing up the business of a similar sounding Indian e-tailer?
The question that we need to really ask is this: Is India’s self-proclaimed tech-powerhouse tag justified when digital illiteracy and inability to tell a social media chat platform from an e-tailer have blown the proverbial lid off our bloated digital egos?
If the digital ocean is full of drops that scream out loud saying “bhakts” and “we cannot take any criticism ever”, then the digital bubble will burst in no time at all.
Last but not the least, is this the kind of digital arm-twisting that is welcome in a connected age? Snapdeal had to suffer when users, angry at Aamir Khan’s “intolerance” comment, uninstalled the app on their mobile phones en bloc and down-rated it on the app store. But later, it was found out that a concerted campaign, leading all the way to BJP IT cell, was behind the mob attack.
It isn’t the BJP IT cell this time around, thank goodness for that. But this spontaneous outpouring of powerful emotions by Indians is a bit too jaded and yawn-inducing, especially when digital literacy and cyber etiquette are so hard to come by.
Snapchat CEO was wrong, but are majority of clueless but endlessly outraging Indians any better?