Indian Ministers Support Koo App Over Twitter
Made in India Twitter alternative ‘Koo’ has seen a tremendous growth in its user base this week, after receiving support from various Indian ministers.
Koo is a social media platform similar to Twitter. It was made in India and was founded by Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka. Koo was launched in 2020 supporting Indian languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, and more. The app had won the government's Digital India Atma Nirbhar Bharat Innovate Challenge last year, which was meant to encourage local app development. Koo earlier had 1.5 million active users. However last week the App had more than 3 million users. The number of people downloading the APp has increased because many Union ministers and various government departments left Twitter and opened their accounts on Koo.
Union Minister Piyush Goyal himself urged Indians to use Koo over Twitter. Because the Koo app has become so popular in India, French security researcher Robert Baptiste tweeted saying that he spent 30 minutes on Koo and was able to Access sensitive user data such as email addresses, gender, and date of birth. He also said that a small part of the company is owned by a Chinese person. Responding to the claims of Baptiste, Radhakrishna on Twitter said that whatever data is available on Koo has been voluntarily shown by users. This is not a data leak. However Baptiste texted and said that Radhakrishna’s response was a lie. Koo has also been accused of cloning Twitter's look and feel, with many describing it as a mere palette swap. Apart from the similarity in the name, Koo has a yellow bird as the mascot, whereas Twitter has a blue one.
