People are deleting ride sharing app, here's why

folarin okunola

January 31, 2017 9:12 AM

After a tweet from the company's New York arm was misconstrued by users to mean Uber supported Donald Trump's muslim ban, users have been deleting the app en masse.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.

Over the weekend, thousand of protesters flooded airports in the US to stand against President

Organisations have also started to join in the protests albeit in varying ways. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance showed support for the cause by calling on social media for drivers to avoid John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Uber also showed support by taking a very public-facing approach that would later get misconstrued by a lot of its users.

The ride-hailing app, via Twitter, announced that it was eliminating "surge pricing" around JFK airport - the same place the taxi drivers were having a one-hour work stoppage.

Even though the Uber announcement came after the scheduled taxi strike, many Uber users took it to mean that Uber was trying to break up or counteract the strike and was acting in support of (or trying to profit off) Donald Trump's "Muslim ban".

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In response to this pre-conceived notion, the Twitter hashtag #DeleteUber quickly started trending as several users started to post screenshots of them deleting the Uber app from their phones.

Uber has since come out to say it wasn't trying to support Trump's executive order, break up the strike, or profit from the entire scenario.

“We’re sorry for any confusion about our earlier tweet — it was not meant to break up any strike,” the company said in a statement to Business Insider. “We wanted people to know they could use Uber to get to and from JFK at normal prices, especially last night.”

A spokesperson for the company told Fortune that “the decision to turn off surge pricing was made specifically to avoid profiting from increased demand during the protest. The company has previously made a similar commitment to limiting surge pricing during disasters, after being accused of taking advantage of riders in times of need.”

Before the taxi strike, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick spoke out against the ban on Facebook adding that the company will financially compensate employees that are negatively affected by Trump's order.

There is no telling how much this misconception will work against Uber or how much market share it will lose to competitors like Lyft as people continue to delete the app from their phones.

folarin okunola