Tag Snapchat

Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page.

Article content

Rihanna’s criticism of Snapchat bosses for allowing an advert that mocked domestic abuse victims has wiped around $800 million off of the company’s market valuation.

Article content

Snapchat users were outraged over the weekend after they were shown an advert for mobile phone game Would You Rather which asked if they would “rather slap Rihanna or punch Chris Brown”, a reference to the Umbrella singer’s 2009 assault at the hands of her then-boyfriend.

Is it just me, or is this ad that popped up on my Snapchat extremely tone deaf? Like what were they thinking with this? pic.twitter.com/7kP9RHcgNG

— Royce Mann (@royceforatlanta) March 12, 2018

Article content

Bosses quickly apologized, and the ad was subsequently pulled from the app, but Rihanna refused to accept their apology, posting a statement on rival app Instagram on Thursday.

“This isn’t about my personal feelings, cause I don’t have much of them,” she wrote. “But all the women, children and men that have been victims of DV (domestic violence) in the past and especially the ones who haven’t made it out yet… you let us down! Shame on you.”

Article content

According to The Wall Street Journal, her angry response, which prompted many of her fans to delete the app, sent shares plummeting and erased $800 million off Snapchat’s market value.

After Rihanna’s outburst, Snapchat executives issued a second apology aiming to stop any more damage to their reputation.

“This advertisement is disgusting and never should have appeared on our service,” a company spokesperson told America’s ABC News. “We are so sorry we made the terrible mistake of allowing it through our review process. We are investigating how that happened so that we can make sure it never happens again.”

The 30-year-old singer is the second celebrity to send Snaphcat shares tumbling in less than a month. In February, reality star Kylie Jenner told her Twitter followers she was no longer using the app, an admission that wiped $1.3 billion off the company’s market valuation.

sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me… ugh this is so sad.

— Kylie Jenner (@KylieJenner) February 21, 2018

Share this article in your social network

Article content

A Twitter post from new mum Kylie Jenner slamming Snapchat has been credited with wiping $1.3 billion from the social media app’s market value.

The Keeping Up with the Kardashians star, whose profile was previously named among the top 10 most-viewed accounts on Snapchat, took to Twitter late on Wednesday to express her disapproval of the app’s recent redesign, which has been widely criticized by fans and tech experts alike for making it seem less user-friendly.

“sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me…,” she asked her 24.5 million followers. “ugh this is so sad (sic).”

“still love you tho snap…,” she later added, calling it “my first love.”

Article content

Her tweets prompted hundreds of replies from followers, with one posting, “if Kylie the snap queen don’t like it then there’s OBVIOUSLY something wrong with the update (sic),” and another suggested Kylie make use of rival app Instagram’s Story feature, writing, “then you can be the queen of instastory now.”

Many urged the 20-year-old to take up the issue directly with company co-founder Evan Spiegel, who is married to model Miranda Kerr, but it appears the damage has already been done as stock market shares for Snapchat’s parent company, Snap Inc., plunged by 7.2% on Thursday.

Kylie, who even fronted a Snapchat companion show for her Life of Kylie reality series last year, only recently returned to her social networking sites after keeping a low profile in the lead-up to the birth of her daughter Stormi, with her rapper boyfriend Travis Scott, earlier this month.

Share this article in your social network