By Pascal Oparada
Shares of Snap Inc., owners of SnapChat, went tumbling down again Thursday after Rihanna took the company to account for an advertisement which the singer said made mockery of domestic violence.
The ad for a game called, Would You Rather, asked users if they would rather “Slap Rihanna” or “Punch Chris Brown”. It seemed to make light of the infamous domestic violence incident between Rihanna and Chris Brown in 2009.
The backlash caused SnapChat to remove the advert and released an apology.
The company said in part, “the advert was reviewed and approved in error, as it violates our advertisement guidelines. We immediately removed the ad last weekend, once we became aware”.
The apology did not stop Rihanna, who posted her disgust in an Instagram account, her disgust for the ad.
The singer blasted the SnapChat for making mockery of domestic violence victims.
“But I am trying to figure out what the point was with this mess,” the singer said.
“I’d love to it ignorance, but I know you aren’t that dumb! You spent money to animate something that would intentionally bring shame to DV victims and made a joke of it!!!”, she said.
Rihanna said the advert is not about her personal feelings, because, according to she does not have them. But she said she she is concerned about all the women, children and men that have been victims of domestic violence, especially ‘the ones who haven’t made it out yet…you let us down!’
She advised her over 60 million Instagram followers to throw the app away.
This immediately resonated with her fans and affected the stock price of SnapChat, as the shares plunged by nearly four per cent to $17.20. This shaved off about $600 million off the company’s value.
The stock dip marks the second time in recent weeks that a celebrity’s social media posts would hurt Snapchat’s bottom line.
On February 22, Kylie Jenner sent a tweet to her 25 million followers asking, “Sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me…. ugh this is so sad.” That single tweet sent the company’s stock plummeting more than 7 percent and cost it an estimated $1.3 billion in market value.
Though Jenner sent a follow-up tweet, explaining she still loved the app, the damage had already been done.
According to experts, what would have hurt the stock price of Snapchat so much was that it was posted on a rival social media, Instagram, which has been looking for ways to do SnapChat in.
Istagram and Facebook has been developing programmes which has similar features as SnapChat.
