Friday, February 3, 2017

Uber looses customers in the wake of Trump's immigration ban, #DeleteUber is still trending

The #DeleteUber movement became a major trend over the weekend after President Donald Trump's travel ban on immigrants from seven Muslim majority countries caused chaos in airports.

When Uber turned off surge pricing amid a taxi strike in opposition of the ban, it was read as an affront to the protesters and social media rage hit ride-hailing company like a brick. 

Former Uber devotees shared screenshots of their reasons for deleting the app in droves — much to the delight of rival Lyft, which capitalized on the controversy (and a public $1 million pledge to the ACLU) and overtook Uber in total App Store downloads for the first time ever on Sunday.

Uber even acknowledged difficulties deleting user accounts as public sentiment appeared to have turned against the ride-hailing giant (the app didn't have an automatic client to handle account cancellations until Monday night).

But how effective was the #DeleteUber movement, really? It got Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to step down from Trump's advisory economic council, but did everyone actually follow through on their online anger and stop using the app? Or was last weekend just a blip on Uber's radar, yet another moment of viral anger to be forgotten?

More than 200,000 people said bye-bye to their Uber accounts, according to the New York Times. But that's a small fraction of the company's monthly active users: 40 million as of October.

culled from Mashable

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