Snapchat found itself taking a big drop at the stock market on Thursday due in part to public backlash voiced by pop singer Rihanna on social media.
Rihanna found an ad on the app posing the question, “Would You Rather?” slapping Rihanna or punching Chris Brown as offensive.
Videos by PopCulture.com
As a victim of domestic violence during her relationship with Brown, Rihanna voiced her outrage on social media.
Rihanna let them KNOW. RIP SNAPCHAT. pic.twitter.com/UPHYMCciCC
โ โู (@Ioveonthebrain) March 15, 2018
“Now SNAPCHAT I know you already know you ain’t my fav app out there! But I’m just trying to figure out what the point was with this mess! I’d love to call it ignorance, but I know you ain’t that dumb! You spent money to animate something that would intentionally bring shame to DV victims and made a joke of it!!!!” Rihanna wrote on her Instagram story.
“This isn’t about my personal feelings, cause I don’t have much of them…but all the women, children, and men that have been victims of DV in the past and especially the ones who haven’t made it out yet….you let us down! Shame on you. Throw the whole app-oligy away.”
Snapchat quickly deleted the ad and issued an apology toDeadline.
“We are so sorry we made the terrible mistake of allowing it through our review process,” Snap said in a statement to Deadline. “We are investigating how that happened so that we can make sure it never happens again.”
Regardless of the apology, Snapchat‘s stock dropped by 4% down to $17.20 per share.
The incident comes weeks after Kylie Jenner caused the company’s stock to drop 7.2% ($1.3 billion in market) by voicing her outrage over the app’s new update.
“Sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me… ugh this is so sad,” Jenner tweeted on Feb. 21.
Jenner’s move inadvertently gave a huge boost to Facebook’s stock, which owns Snapchat’s main competition with the photo-sharing app Instagram. During the same time Snapchat’s stock began to fall, Facebook’s shot up from $516.83 billion to $532.86 billion in market valu7e.
Jenner was just one of many Snapchat users to voice their disgust over the app’s latest update, which combines the “Friends” and “Discovery” sections of the site, making it more difficult for users to see their friends’ story post as they’re forced to navigate through pages and pages of pop-ups and stories from various media outlets.
