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| CEO Of SnapChat |
The die is cast. Even as I write this on a Saturday evening, there are 3,744 posts on Twitter which have the words “Snapchat CEO”. That’s Spiegel, the 26-year-old billionaire founder of Snapchat.
A quick swipe down of these tweets makes you hope that young Mr Spiegel: A) Doesn’t log onto Twitter today B) Doesn’t have a friend or worse, a colleague from India who has to translate some of the tweets from blue Hindi to polite English c) He suffers some kind of emoji understanding disability.
The reason why some Indian twitterati are bursting an artery about Spiegel and posting profane tweets with hashtags like #boycottsnapchat instead of downing strong beer in industrial proportions, like every other Saturday night, is an alleged comment that that Spiegel is said to have made.
“This app (Snapchat) is only for rich people. I don't want to expand into poor countries like India and Spain,” Spiegel is said to have remarked, when an employee is said to have asked about the company’s plans to expand in India. That’s why the tweets are flowing thick and fast, the mood on Twitter is souring and the beer tastes rancid.
Now, if you are hearing about Spiegel’s comment from this post and experience a hot flush in your amygdala -- that’s the part of your brain responsible for outrage -- hold that feeling for a moment and pause your itchy fingers before firing that angry tweet.
One, Spiegel’s alleged comment is part of a lawsuit filed by a former employee, Anthony Pompliano, who among other things, has claimed that “Snap Inc shared inflated metrics during the time of its IPO.” For its part, the messaging company claims that Pompliano was a “disgruntled employee fired for poor performance”.
Maybe Spiegel actually said that poor, hungry Indians don’t deserve to use an app that started off as a photo sharing platform for American teens in various stages of undress. Maybe he didn’t.
But I would hold my judgement on Spiegel till he has had his say. And I hope he does say something, instead of commanding his lawyers to put out a squeaky clean, vapid statement.
The cost of silence on something like this can be scarring -- for life. Fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger can give Spiegel a crash course on this.
Back in 1996, when the Internet was a toddler and Spiegel was probably discovering lollipops, an email went ‘viral’, well before the term itself was invented.
The email had a subject line: “FWD: Tommy Hilfiger hates us…”
Entirely fictitious, the mail read:
“Did you see the recent Oprah Winfrey show on which Tommy Hilfiger was a guest? Oprah asked Hilfiger if his alleged statements about people of color were true – he’s been accused of saying things such as ‘If I had known that African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians would buy my clothes, I would not have made them so nice,’ and ‘I wish those people would not buy my clothes – they were made for upper-class whites.”
The truth was that Hilfiger hadn’t been on The Oprah Winfrey Show. And he had made no such comments about Asians or minorities.
But as a young boy growing up in Chennai, I remember two unlikely friends –- a loud dandy and a soft-spoken ‘patriot’—having a nasty scrap because the former bought a pair of Hilfiger underwear in the late 90s.
In his book memoir, published in 2016, Tommy Hilfiger wrote about the how much not quashing early that rumour hurt him.
“I thought it was nonsense, and that anyone who read it would know it was slander,” Hilfiger writes in the book. “For one thing, I’d never said, thought, or felt anything remotely so repugnant. For another, I’d never appeared on Oprah. “If I just ignore this,” I figured, ‘It’ll go away.’
“The opposite happened. It metastasized. Pretty soon the list of people I supposedly hated extended to Indians, Filipinos, gays, and others.”
“The rumor persists. Friends tell me they still hear at the synagogue that I’m an anti-semite, and at church that I’m a racist. Even though it’s been a decade, the accusations still burn at times.”
The moral of the story, Mr Spiegel, is this: explain your stance – honestly and clearly. If you indeed think poor countries don’t deserve Snapchat, explain why you think so. I’m not sure how many of your core users will abandon the app just because you have a point of view that they don’t agree with.
But if you think Pompliano is putting words in your mouth, then come out and deny it. Tommy Hilfiger will advise the same thing.
One last thing: if you deny, let your denial be long, clear and lucid.
Don’t snap it, please.
