11 highlights
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In the last few weeks, Koo has also positioned itself as a platform which promises to uphold freedom of speech as a paramount principle of doing business. It has sniped at Twitter, which has been dousing recurring fires by banning accounts that it says are in violation of Twitter rules.
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Following closely on the heels of Republic TV, a right-wing news channel which joined Koo some weeks back, several government departments have set up accounts on the platform in quick succession.
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Because we do not believe that the actions we have been directed to take are consistent with Indian law, and, in keeping with our principles of defending protected speech and freedom of expression, we have not taken any action on accounts that consist of news media entities, journalists, activists, and politicians.
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MeitY has said that Twitter’s move to publish the above blog post before a crucial meeting with the government officials isn’t something they appreciate.
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Those on the left are deriding Koo as just another loony idea in a long list of social media apps which have tried to take Twitter’s place. Before Koo, there was Tooter, and before that Mastodon. Neither amounted to anything significant, except chuckles.
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It’s not one of the most widely shared facts about the app, but Koo has been around for just under a year now. Co-founder Aprameya Radhakrishna, who earlier co-founded cab-hailing startup TaxiForSure, has been bullish about India’s non-English speaking internet users for a long time.
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Like most second-time tech entrepreneurs, Radhakrishna raised capital based on the fact that he had a successful exit the first time, having sold TaxiForSure to Ola.
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In 2018, he launched Vokal, a question and answer app in 11 regional languages.
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The reach of the language quickly becomes a barrier, rather than an enabler of adoption and growth of the platform. Very much like Vokal, Koo’s rollout was expected along similar lines of adding more and more regional languages.
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Much of the initial fuel to move to Koo was led by IT minister Ravishankar Prasad, who’s been on the platform for a long time now. He was followed by MeitY and other government departments and politicians, who’ve started bringing in their own followers, who say they are done with Big Tech’s censorship.
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Sure, Twitter is in a “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” situation. Except, that’s the challenge of all content moderation efforts. It is subjective, open to interpretation and there is a very thin line between moderation and shutting down an important voice.