Roving Periscope: Twitter suspends its Indian challenger Koo’s account
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: The First Digital World War may have just begun!
Embattled microblogging site Twitter has suspended the account of its Indian rival, multilingual app Koo, which logged over a million downloads within two days of the launch in Brazil in November and emerged as the world’s second-largest microblogging platform with over 50 million downloads.
The media reported the Twitter handle @kooeminence was suspended on Friday after Elon Musk-owned Twitter also suspended the accounts of several prominent global journalists.
Taking to Twitter, Mayank Bidawatka, cofounder of Koo, said, “I forgot. There’s more! – Banning Mastodon account. – Not allowing mastodon links saying it’s unsafe. – Banning Koo’s eminence handle. I mean seriously. How much more control does the guy need?”
Mastodon is a social media rival of Twitter.
In a series of tweets, Bidawatka questioned the rationale behind suspending the @kooeminence account, which was set up only a few days ago for queries posed by celebrities and VIPs wanting to use the Indian social media platform.
“1. Posting publicly available info isn’t doxxing. Why shoot the messenger?
- Journalists that posted links did nothing wrong. Posting a link to publicly available info isn’t doxxing the way posting a link to an online article isn’t plagiarism.
- Leaving spaces without answering journalists is bad.
- Creating policies out of thin air to suit yourself is worse.
- Changing your stance every other day is inconsistent.
- Posting a video of an unknown car on Twitter with the car plate showing – how’s that allowed?” he added.
The Koo cofounder claimed Twitter killed spaces overnight to control conversations. “There are other things Twitter did in the past week which is not a democracy. One needs to speak up.”
While promoting Koo, Bidawatka said it was the best alternative to Twitter.
“This place is what it is because of you and millions of other users like us. Let’s not fuel this guy’s ego,” he added.
He also said, “And guess what? Suddenly. Almost suddenly #ElonIsDestroyingTwitter has been removed from the trending section. Twitter is a publisher. Not a platform anymore!”
This came a day after Twitter suspended the accounts of nearly half-a-dozen prominent journalists, who have been covering the social media site and Musk, citing they had violated rules against “doxxing.”
The suspended accounts include those of Ryan Mac of The New York Times, Donie O’Sullivan of CNN, Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, Matt Binder of Mashable, Micah Lee of The Intercept, political journalist Keith Olbermann, Aaron Rupar, and Tony Webster, both independent journalists, The New York Times reported.
On Thursday (local time), Twitter displayed “account suspended” notices on the accounts of these journalists and updated its policy, prohibiting the sharing of “live location information, including information shared on Twitter directly or links to 3rd-party URL(s) of travel routes.”
Meanwhile, the United Nations and the European Union have threatened to sanction Musk for the actions taken by Twitter, the media reported.
Interestingly, Musk and many Twitter users, including the platform’s rivals, are using Twitter itself to express their views! Rivals like Koo have also used Twitter to market themselves!!
Ever since billionaire Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October for USD 44 billion, the company is facing one crisis after another as users wonder whether their once-favorite app has turned ‘toxic.’ In less than a month after acquiring Twitter, Musk set in motion massive changes and sacked over half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees worldwide.
In November, the Indian multilingual app Koo said it received a “tremendous response” from Brazilian users and logged over 10 lakh downloads within 48 hours of launch in the South American market.
Koo is now readying to make the app available in more countries and multiple languages, the media reported.
“India’s multilingual microblogging platform, Koo App, was launched in Brazil with the addition of the Portuguese language, making it available in 11 native languages now,” the Indian site said last month.
Koo came to the number one spot on both the Android Play Store and Apple App Store for the last few days, it added.
With a blockbuster entry of an open platform for self-expression in different languages, Koo witnessed 20 lakh Koos and one crore likes within 48 hours, by users in Brazil alone, the statement said.
Koo CEO and co-founder Aparameya Radhakrishna said the support is a testimony that the platform is solving a problem for native language-speaking users not only in India but across the world.
With hashtags like #RIPTwitter, #GoodByeTwitter, and #TwitterShutdown trending on Twitter recently, Bidawatka offered seamless migration of the users’ old Tweets to his site.
“We will soon enable you to seamlessly migrate all your old Tweets to Koo and also help find your existing Twitter following on Koo. Will keep you posted,” he tweeted. He also offered to hire some of the Twitter ex-employees as “we keep expanding and raise our larger, next round.”
The multilingual platform, launched in March 2020, is trying to tap the opportunity as Twitter faces a series of crises.
“We are currently available in 10 languages and have users from over 100 countries. We have granted over 7,500 yellow ticks of eminence and a few lakhs of green self-verification ticks to increase transparency and credibility on the platform,” he said.
He said the firm was working on adding more new global languages.
The media reported that Musk’s ‘scorched-Earth’ approach to Twitter management and reinstatement of Donald Trump’s account risk making it not just toxic, but also uncool.
For some Twitter celebrities, particularly those working in politics and crypto-finance, the potential demise of the platform under Elon Musk’s stewardship is a serious problem.
“As a backup plan, follow me on Instagram @AOC–it’s really me there,” tweeted US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to her 13.4 million followers in November.
