Much has changed at Twitter since Elon Musk took control of the micro-blogging platform. The integrity of the company has been questioned time and again, especially regarding its free speech policy and content moderation practices. This has allowed some competing micro-blogging sites to rise to the occasion, and welcome users who are migrating away from Twitter.
India-based micro-blogging platform Koo has emerged as a key competitor in this space, racking up over 50 million users and becoming popular in fast-expanding social media markets like Brazil. In an exclusive interaction with Outlook Business, Koo’s CEO and co-founder Aprameya Radhakrishna shares his views on the desi app’s global appeal, the larger Koo vs Twitter debate, and how the homegrown app is distinct from other competitors of Twitter. Edited excerpts:
Koo has been pitched as the Twitter-killer since day one. Now, despite your rise to the position of second largest micro-blogging website, the difference between brand equity of Twitter and Koo remains large. Are there any inflection points from where you think you would be able to take a lead on Twitter?
You need to understand that the comparison is humbling yet unfair at many levels. Twitter is a global tech giant that’s been operational since 2006 with extremely strong network effects being the first to the party. Koo is barely a 3 years old platform that started in India with the objective of serving the underserved language users.
Since the first wave of social media apps catered to English speaking audiences alone, we were creating a category among users that never used such platforms earlier. In such cases the adoption is usually slow since it’s a learning curve to get used to the benefits of such a new category.
What’s happening at Twitter is that users are unhappy about seeing political content they didn’t subscribe to, and there are too many new and changing policies. Eminent personalities may lose their verification marks unless they cough up $8 per month for basic features, and the society at large is dealing with content moderation issues with dwindling content mod teams at Twitter. All of this is apart from the looming debt payment issues Twitter is facing due to decreasing ad revenues.
The world is looking for a safe and stable alternative they can call home and Koo is the best available alternative out there. The biggest difference between Koo and Twitter lies in our philosophy. Our mission is to unite the world in spite of the language barriers. We are inclusive by definition. To sum it up, we have a large and wide canvas to paint, globally.
Why do you claim that Koo is the globally the best alternative to Twitter?
We have more than 60 million downloads worldwide, 20+ languages and are the second largest microblog available to the world. In just 3 years of launch, we have received so much love and support from our users.
Koo solves everything that annoys users today about Twitter. It is a friendly, safe, transparent, fair, neutral and healthy platform that cares about its users. It is a very simple-to-use product that’s extremely feature rich and provides all of this for free. We are the most inclusive platform out there. Most platforms suffer from content moderation issues.
We have invested heavily in fighting evils like fake news, hate speech, impersonation and pornography. Our privacy and data policies are very transparent and fair too. We respect local laws and have clear community guidelines that protect our users from social evils. The biggest difference lies in our philosophy. Our vision is to unite the world despite language barriers and provide them a safe space.
Twitter is used by almost every top celebrity of the world. Since India is a big market, what strategy are you using to onboard public intellectuals, journalists, academics, filmmakers and actors of the world?
We are already home to more than 8,000 eminent personalities across countries, who are using our platform on a regular basis. The list includes famous footballer Ronaldinho, President of Brazil Lula da Silva, Dalai Lama and some of the most prominent personalities in India across entertainment, spirituality, arts and sports such as cricketer Virat Kohli, Bollywood director Karan Johar, spiritual leaders Sadhguru and Sri Sri Gurudev Ravi Shankar, badminton player Saina Nehwal, and billiards champion Pankaj Advani to name a few.
Due to our unique experiences, people recommendations and multi-lingual posting feature, celebrities can reach out to a larger base of audience. Our growth comes from the credible word-of-mouth generated by these popular figures among their circles.
Koo has been backed by India's ruling party, with the Prime Minister even mentioning the platform in his 'Mann Ki Baat' when it was launched. Do you think this has categorised you as a pro-government platform, something that dissuades people with dissenting views from joining your platform?
We are honoured to have been mentioned by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his monthly speech. Many young start-ups would vie for such attention. It’s important for everyone to understand that when an important piece of technology is created in the country, for the world, we should all support it and be proud of it as a nation. That’s how young and promising start-ups grow. We should have every Indian take pride in the fact that Koo is made in India and competing with global tech giants.
I am happy to see that our country’s leaders and thousands of eminent personalities across the spectrum are using it and supporting it. Those who don’t, have no reason to be on the fence. This support shouldn’t be looked at as a personal endorsement as much as a call to a larger India to support not just Koo but many other promising Indian attempts to win our place in the world.
As far as political parties and leaders are concerned, we have over 20 parties on the platform with leaders from these parties on it. Even if you see the joining dates of many leaders around the world on Twitter, they didn’t join it till a few years after it started. This is a natural progression of platforms and they may behave the same way as far as their adoption of Koo is concerned as well.
We are known for our transparency in thought and actions. We have published our content moderation policies and our algorithms to provide an extremely safe space for everyone to express their thoughts and connect with each other. Most of our processes and tools are even better than what global tech giants have. This is something all of us should be proud of.
Can Koo replicate the success it has had in Brazil in other international markets as well?
Absolutely, Koo is the best available alternative to Twitter. There is immense potential to succeed around the world with our solution. We give tools to every native language speaker to have a voice and a safe space on the open internet. We will keep expanding to multiple countries. We have launched many new global languages, and this too will keep expanding to accommodate more languages in due time.
Koo is now available in over 20 languages including English, French, German, Italian, Indonesian, Spanish, Portuguese, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Filipino and Turkish. We are extremely user focused and in a world that’s platform or owner focused, this will help us win the world over.
What is your take on Elon Musk's style of running the show at Twitter? Do you espouse his style of leadership?
I sense a growing dissent among many Twitter users and eminent personalities. Many of the current decisions and policies don’t seem to go down well with them. Which explains why many are looking for alternatives aggressively. The effects of the layoffs and new management will be more stark in the coming few months. It’s a large network and it takes a lot for a massive fall overnight but the cracks have become evident.
Unless there’s a new and stable leadership, the fall may be even sharper in the coming few quarters. This is apart from the financial burden that Musk has brought over Twitter from the debt taken to buy the company. It seems that Twitter may have lost a lot of organisational learning through the mass layoffs and it will take the new team time to re-learn what was learnt over one and a half decades. Twitter has done a lot in the recent months that may be very difficult to recover from.
Today the biggest talk on Twitter is about Twitter. Everyday there’s some new antic. Recently, someone impersonated a senator and got the profile verified by paying $8 for it. Profiles of the Taliban got verified and were taken down again. We believe that a platform is successful when it’s invisible. People are not on the platform to discuss the platform. They are on it to know what’s happening in the world around them and to take something new away from it every day. That’s what we deliver.
What new features are you working on to make Koo attractive in 2023?
Koo is a user-first platform with many unique features that no other platform boasts of. Users can express themselves in their language with our language keyboard, a 500 character limit, posting in multiple languages at one go, scheduling their posts for a later time and date, editing their messages, getting self-verified for free within 15 seconds, favouriting a creator, uploading multiple profile photos and attaching more media.
We recently also introduced the Twitter migration feature to have users transition to Koo seamlessly, eliminating the need to start from ground zero. There’s a long list of such unique features. We will keep adding many new features in the near future such as stories, toxic/hate speech feedback to commenters, enabling creators to pin their favorite comment, detailed analytics for creators, creator monetisation etc. Broadly, we want to give the power and control to users and creators to create a world they want to live in.
