- Monday, February 24, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
AT a time when social media giant Twitter is seeing a waning presence in India, thanks to its prolonged confrontation with the Narendra Modi government, things look more hopeful for the home-grown social media platform Koo.
A number of government departments in the country and ministers are keen to promote Koo even as Twitter faces accusation of non-compliance with India’s new information technology laws.
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Recently, India’s new information technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw opened a new account on Koo and soon after, announced a review of social media companies’ compliance with strict new laws, an information which was not posted to his 259,000 followers on Twitter, Reuters reported.
One government official in media relations said on the condition of anonymity that the idea is “to create an alternative to Twitter”, the Reuters report added.
Other ministers and members of prime minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) also shared a similar sentiment since they are not impressed with Twitter’s defying attitude, a senior member of the BJP’s information technology department told the news outlet.
The Modi government first criticised Twitter in February this year after the latter refused to fully comply with an order to take down accounts and posts that allegedly spread misinformation about farmers’ protests that have challenged the government for months now. Twitter claimed that some of the requests were not in line with the Indian law.
More recently, Twitter was accused of allowing videos that allegedly jeopardised communal harmony to circulate on its platform, besides displaying a wrong map of India and even not flagging child pornography on its site.
Koo has emerged as the beneficiary of the government-Twitter confrontation. It accommodates content in eight languages and its downloads went up 10 times to more than three million in just two days.
