Indian social media app Koo on a surge after Twitter faced backlash by Centre over its policies

Last updated on February 16th, 2021 at 07:04 am

India has its very own social media app, Koo, which is gaining all the love and attention from the country’s politicians with others flocking in to use it. The app gained traffic after last Wednesday’s popular social media platform Twitter received rebuke of the Centre for not complying with the orders to take down certain red-flagged content. Twitter had also received a warning from the Government of India that it needs to follow the Indian laws.

Twitter had said in a blog post that it hasn’t blocked the accounts of journalists, activists, news media, and politicians, as this would violate their fundamental right to expression and speech. The IT Ministry said, “Upon the request of Twitter seeking a meeting with the government, the Secretary IT was to engage with senior management of Twitter. In this light, a blog post published prior to this engagement is unusual.”

Koo is a micro-blogging platform similar to Twitter through which users can post multimedia content along with audio clips. Text word limit is 400 characters and the app supports six Indian languages, including English. Koo’s logo is a yellow bird. For mentions, users can use ‘hashtag’ (#) and “@” symbol. App also has ‘re-koo’ option, much like retweets on Twitter. The option of chat is available instead of direct messaging. 

Koo was launched in March 2020 by MBA graduates Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka. The duo has also founded Vokal, an audio-video knowledge sharing platform like Quora. Koo has won a government award for ‘driving tech innovation’. 

A free app, Koo is available both on iOS and Android platforms. On Google Play, the app is called “Koo: Connect with Indians in Indian Languages”. 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is yet to join the social media platform but he mentioned it last year in his monthly radio address. He said, “It’s called Koo. In this, we can place our opinion and interact in our mother tongue through text, video or audio.”