The native version of Twitter, Koo App is a micro blogging site just like Twitter and was launched in March 2020. It has been made by Bombinet Technologies Private Limited of Bengaluru and was designed by Apameya Radhakrishnan and Mayank Bidvakta from India.
It is currently available in four Indian languages - Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada. It has more than 1 million downloads on the Play Store.
Koo’s website reads about the app that only 10 percent of people in India speak English whereas about 100 crore people do not know English. Even though they have a mobile phone in their hands and most things on the Internet are in English but Ku want to hear the voice of the Indians.
In Between Twitter and the Indian government deadlock, #kooapp trended on Twitter on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chauhan, Railway Minister Piyush Goyal and many ministers told that they have created their account on Ku. Also an appeal was made to people to join them on this Indian micro-blogging site.
By the time the new reached out, more than 31 thousand followers of Piyush Goyal and about 3500 followers of Shivraj Singh Chauhan had become. Apart from this, departments like Niti Aayog have also come on the Kuo app.
Twitter on Wednesday replied to the central government who instructed twitter to block more than a thousand twitter account and since then Ku started being discussed on many social media platforms.
What Part government’s self-reliant India campaign played?
Irrespective of the controversies with twitter, the government is already promoting it.
In the year 2020, in the self-sustaining App Innovation Challenge organized by the government, the Koo app was declared the winner along with apps like Spark and Zoho. Even video apps like Chingari and Zoho Tiktok, came into the discussion after the ban on Tiktok.
Many experts believe that Koo coming back into the discussion can also be a government strategy to pressure Twitter.
In the Mann Ki Baat program last year, PM Modi mentioned the Ku App. Modi said, “There is a micro blogging platform app, its name is Ku, in this we can talk, interact and interact in our mother tongue through text, video and audio.”
What leads to dispute between Twitter and the government?
On Tuesday, the Indian government has ordered Twitter to close 1178 Twitter accounts related to alleged Pakistan and Khalistan supporters who have been spreading misinformation and provocative content about the farmers’ protests.
The Ministry of Information Technology had shared a list of these Twitter accounts on February 4. The listed accounts were identified by security agencies as pro-Khalistan or Pakistan-backed and operated accounts from foreign soil, which threatens public order during the peasant movement. Such measures were not new, Earlier also the government had ordered Twitter to remove those ‘handles’ and ‘hashtags’ which claimed that the farmer massacre was being planned. The government had said that such misinformation and inflammatory material would affect public order.
On Wednesday, Twitter wrote in an official blog that the company has suspended over 500 Twitter accounts that were clearly in the category of spam and were misusing the platform. The company has taken action against hundreds of accounts violating the rules. Especially against those who were full of violence, abuse and threats. Along with this, the company has also stopped some trends that violate the rules.
Micro-blogging website Twitter has also written in this blog that the company is in favour of freedom of expression and recently the basis on which the central government asked to close Twitter accounts is not in accordance with Indian laws. In response to the same, a tweet has been made by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India.
The tweet reads, “On Twitter’s request, the secretary of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology was supposed to be in talks with the company’s senior management. But it is an unusual thing for the company to write a blog in this regard. The government will soon take a call on this. Will share their feedback. “
