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NEW DELHI – In early February, politicians in India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party began registering on a social network that almost no one had heard of.
“Now I am Koo,” the Indian trade minister said published His nearly 10 million followers on Twitter. “Connect with me on this Indian microblogging platform in real time to get exciting and exclusive updates.” Millions of people followed, most of them supporters of the BJP, and the Twitter clone became an immediate success, with more than 2 million people installed over 10 days this month, according to app analysis firm Sensor Tower.
Time was no coincidence. In days gone by, the Indian government was locked in a hard tug of war with Twitter, which defied the legal order. block Accounts criticizing the Hindu nationalist government in India, including journalists and a journal of new research. In the face of this, the IT Ministry of India threatened To send Twitter officials to jail. In the midst of the conflict, government officials promoted Koo as a nationalist alternative without the influence of the Americans.
This site charges itself “The voice of India in the languages of India”It’s almost like Twitter, if“ Koos ”is only 400 characters long, the trending section is filled with government propaganda and the logo is a yellow bird, not a blue one.
More worryingly, in Koo, Hindu supremacism is rampant and hatred against Muslims, India’s largest minority, flows freely, driven by the strongest supporters of the government.
An employee of the BJP party has published a poll to help followers choose four labels that are harmful to Muslims, including “anti-nationals” and “jihadist dogs”. A person who claims to teach biotechnology at the Indian Institute of Technology at a Silicon Valley graduate engineering college has shared a hateful comic strip depicting Muslim men as members of a bloodthirsty crowd. Some shared conspiracy theories about Muslims spreading the disease, others about crimes committed by people with Muslim names who tried to demonize an entire religion. One person warned Muslims not to follow and called them shameless. “I hate [them]”, Said one of his posts.
As a global Internet flakes, and major platforms like Facebook and Twitter square against nation-states and appropriate looking at the discourse of hatred, nationalist alternatives are emerging to organize it, experts say, with an increasing tendency.
“This content seeks to find new homes,” Evelyn Douek, a professor at Harvard Law School, who studies global regulation of online speech, told BuzzFeed News. The hatred, misinformation, harassment and impetus that major platforms have had for years are particularly problematic on platforms like Koo, he said, because they explore these sites less. “Eventually these platforms will reach all platforms,” Douek said, “but with the proliferation of these alternatives, there is likely to be less attention and pressure. Also, the possibility that there will be a global Internet with a kind of discourse and completely alternative conversations taking place in parallel on national platforms. is created. “
Aprameya Radhakrishna, the founder and CEO of Koo, told BuzzFeed News that his website was not intended as a vehicle of hatred or designed to be an ideological chamber of echo.
“You can’t moderate all content on a scale,” he said.
Radhakrishna is a Bangalore businessman who in 2015 sold Ola to India’s Uber rival Ola for $ 200 million in 2015. He launched Koo in March last year. Earlier this month, as downloads went up, the company went up $ 4.1 million from investors include former co-founder Mohandas Pai Infosys, a supporter of the Modi government’s voice.
Koo has no moderation group, Radhakrishna said. Instead, the platform relies on people to mark content that they think is problematic. One group examines only parts of the content that Radhakrishna calls “exceptions”.
“Facebook and Twitter are also inventing moderation,” Radhakrishna said. “We’re a 10-month company. We are working on our policies. ”He added that he believed that expressing thoughts was not a problem until it caused violence.
“We’re not going to take action against something because we want to,” he said. “It will be taken based on the laws of the land.”
A small section called “Rules and Conduct” buried in the terms and conditions of the application prohibits people from posting content that is “invasive”, “hateful”, “racial” or “ethnically reprehensible” or “despicable”.
However comparisons Parler positioned Twitter and Facebook as conservative alternatives in the US, with Radhakrishna stressing that his app is apolitical. “We would like anyone who would like to accept the platform to accept it,” he said. “Politics is not the only aspect of India. The platform is made to express and express anything. “
More than a dozen Indian government departments use now Koo. Earlier this month, the country’s IT ministry, a government department that threatened Twitter officials with imprisonment, issued a statement about Koo expressing displeasure about Twitter, on Twitter, the platform chosen by the department for official announcements, before publishing the same statement.
Within Twitter, among India’s growing global markets, employees are watching Koo. “It’s definitely on our radar,” an employee who asked for anonymity told BuzzFeed News. “I still don’t know if it’s going to be a threat, but we’re watching.”
Radhakrishna said the company’s original origins gave it an advantage. “We are an Indian company and we will place our behavior around an Indian context,” he said. “That will be better than what international companies do, because they are also driven by the domestic policies they have determined.”
Asked what he meant by the “Indian context”, Radhakrishna said he had no specific example. “I haven’t dealt with a real scenario,” he said.
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