Diwali In India 2014: Snapchat Photos Impress Twitter Users

Snapchat helped spread awareness of Diwali, one of the biggest Indian festivals of the year, through a “story.” Snapchat, the ephemeral picture mobile app, sent out a fleeting story that showed gorgeous pictures from the Hindu festival of lights Thursday.

Twitter users flocked to the social media site to talk about some of the pictures they observed. Some people said they never heard of the festival before, but became infatuated with it.

Some wanted to attend.

Not everyone was a fan. Apparently some Twitter users complained about one of the day’s top-trending topics. But others were there to defend the Indian holiday.

Some saw the “Diwali in India” trend as a type of ignorance in the U.S.

Others thanked Snapchat for the story, as it allowed them to catch the festival of lights.

Even though Snapchat was widely praised Thursday, the mobile app was criticized by some after the “Snappening.” Thousands of personal photos leaked on 4chan and Reddit, with Reddit quickly banning the pictures since many of them contained lewd images of underage girls.

Snapchat denied there was a flaw in its server, and it was later revealed that a third-party app, Snapsaved, was responsible for the leak. “SnapChat has not been hacked, and these images do not originate from their database,” Snapsaved said. An anonymous administrator said the site was hacked.

“The content released from [Snapsaved] was provided to us by the administrator of the site,” the anonymous hacker said. “Users could freely browse all media on this website… . When the site became unusable, the administrator compiled a full directory of the content and uploaded it to an un-indexed website where you could freely download it.”

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