After a Surf Excel ad, which showed a Hindu girl helping her Muslim friend to avoid being attacked with Holi colours before dropping him off at a mosque, drew flak for propagating ‘anti-Hindu’ sentiments, those protesting the ad found a creative (and confusing) way to voice their dissent.
Other than defaming Surf Excel on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, several of the protesters began to give 1-star ratings and left negative reviews for what they believed to be the ‘Surf Excel’ app, except that they mixed it up and ended up bad mouthing the ‘Microsoft Excel’ app instead.
Some of the seemingly misdirected anger at the ‘Microsoft Excel’ app, believed by the angry reviewers to be the ‘Surf Excel’ app read: “Boykot sarf excel. hindu birodh hai. pakisthan me ja kar business kar.” (Boycott Surf Excel, it is against Hindus. Go to Pakistan and do your business there)
Another one read: “I used to like this app, until they partnered with Surf and made such a disgusting anti religious ad. Now where ever I read the word Excel I can only think of anti Hindu propaganda. Shame on you for doing this.”
It’s important to mention here that this isn’t the first time that dissenting voices have chosen the measure of giving bad ratings and reviews to apps, with the purpose of defaming the app or people associated with the app. What’s more, it also isn’t the first time that these dissenting voices have given bad ratings and reviews to the wrong app!
Back in 2017, a report recorded a statement made by Snapchat CEO Evan Speigel, where he had reportedly said that the company was not planning to expand into India as the country was “too poor”. This left Indians fuming and they took a similar route of down-rating the app on the play store. Only, they ended up giving one-star ratings and bad reviews to Indian e-commerce giant Snapdeal by mistake, leading to a whole lot of confusion!
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