Have developed a thick skin to trolls: Snapdeal's Kunal Bahl

Priyanka Sahay

Moneycontrol Bureau

Snapdeal’s chief executive officer and co-founder Kunal Bahl is not a worried man. Even as anonymous Twitter accounts on social media are abuzz about a restructuring exercise inside Snapdeal, Bahl told Moneycontrol he has developed a thick skin to such accounts.

While there have been multiple tweets by trollers such as @StartupKumar and @CorporateKumar @startupbabu on senior executives such as Snapdeal SVP Corporate Finance Sanjay Aggarwal, ‎Jayant Sood - Chief Customer Experience Officer, exiting the company, there hasn’t been any official confirmation from the company.

“I have developed an inch thick skin to such anonymous twitter trolls,” said Kunal Bahl, CEO of Snapdeal, indicating that the trolls were handles started by vested interests.

One of the tweets, however mentioned the exit of Vulcan chief executive officer Vijay Ghadge. This one turned out to be correct. This was however not basis internal gossips but through a letter which was circulated by the company to its employees.

Snapdeal did not comment on whether or not these allegations by these social media trolls had any merit. “We do not comment on anonymous social media posts. Team members have access to multiple sources of authentic information within the company,”  a Snapdeal spokesperson said in an official email response.

The Indian startup ecosystem is now full of trollers who provide insider news and gossip to  lay readers. Some of these trolls include @IndoBelly, @StartupKumar, @UniconBaba, and @CorporateKumar.

One such troll even complained that there were anonymous login attempts on his account from three different devices. This is not for the first time that companies or individuals are being targeted on social media.

In June, holder of Twitter account handle @Uni_con1 claimed that former chief executive officer of fashion etailer Jabong Praveen Sinha, had made personal gains by business dealings at the company. Sinha subsequently filed a legal case against the account holder of the said Twitter handle.

While some of the information by such handles does come out to be true, most of the time the handles are making fun of one company or another.Clearly, as Indian startup startup ecosystem matures and social media freedom exists, such trolls will continue to engage audiences and sometime prove to be whistleblowers.

According to a report in TechCrunch, Twitter has updated its abuse policy. As per Twitter, content that targets people on the basis of gender, race, national origin sexual orientation etc. can be reported for removal. It now also allows users to mute accounts, key words besides conversations, where a person is tagged but does not want to keep seeing.

It was however not immediately clear if the above mentioned tweets, came under the abuse policy conduct. The trolls also tweet random stuff about the companies.priyanka.sahay@network18online.com