The app won Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Atma Nirbhar app challenge last year.
What you need to know
- Amid Twitter’s standoff with the Indian government, many prominent leaders of India’s ruling party have switched to Koo.
- The ‘Made in India’ micro-blogging platform was launched in March last year.
- Unlike Twitter, however, Koo requires users to have a valid phone number to sign up.
Earlier this month, the Indian government sent a notice to Twitter, asking the social media giant to restrict accounts related to the ongoing farmer protests. Unsurprisingly, Twitter has announced in a blog post that it would not take any actions on accounts of journalists, activists, and politicians, as doing so would violate their fundamental right to free expression under the country’s law.
While Twitter says it will continue to” maintain dialogue with the Indian government,” several organizations from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology have set up accounts on Koo, a ‘Made in India’ micro-blogging platform (via Business Today).
Although India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology hasn’t issued a detailed response to Twitter’s blog post yet, it wrote in a post on Koo:
Upon the request of Twitter seeking a meeting with the Govt., the Secretary IT was to engage with senior management of Twitter. In this light a blog post published prior to this engagement is unusual. Govt. will share its response soon.
Since Koo is an India-focused app, it supports many popular Indian languages. The languages that are currently supported on the platform include English, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Assamese, Punjabi, Gujarati, Malayalam, and Oriya. Similar to Twitter, Koo lets you use hashtags and tag other people in your posts with the @ symbol. However, Koo offers a higher character limit of 400 and requires you to use your phone number to create an account.
