India’s alternative to microblogging site Twitter, Koo has garnered over 10 million users amid the former’s repeated skirmishes with the Centre over the past few months. Koo, which was launched 16 months ago, allows users to send tweet-like posts known as Koos in English, Hindi and other regional languages. The app saw 85 per cent of its users including government ministers, Bollywood celebrities, cricketers and opposition leaders since February.
Though Koo grabbed eyeballs due to Twitter’s tension with the Modi government, its biggest advantage over Twitter was that users could express their thoughts in their mother tongue only on this app, according to Aprameya Radhakrishna, co-founder and CEO of the indigeneous social media app. “Our app connects English-speaking India to non-English speaking India in a country with 700 million Internet users and that’s powerful,” Radhakrishna told Bloomberg.
He further added that Koo is looking at 100 million in a year. he also mentioned that the Bengaluru-based microblogging startup plans to expand into markets like Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, South America and Africa, into countries where English is not the main medium of communication.
Twitter and the Centre have been embroiled in a back-and-forth over the content on San Francisco-based social media platform such as Twitter not removing posts critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the COVID-19 crisis while branding posts by the ruling party officials as misleading and also removing the blue tick from Vice President Venkaiah Naidu’s account citing inactivity. Following this, an Indian court said that Twitter did not comply with the new information technology rules that required the social media companies to appoint officials for handling compliance and grievance related issues.
Edited by Mehak Agarwal
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