Koo Compliance Report: Swadeshi Microblogging Platform Received 3,767 Complaints

Swadeshi (locally made) Twitter alternative Koo has published its sixth compliance report since the government’s new IT Rules came into effect in May last year. The microblogging platform received complaints against more than 3767 ‘Koos’ which is what the platform calls its version of tweets. 

Founded by Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka in 2020, Koo is a microblogging platform available in eight Indian languages including Hindi, Kannada, Marathi and others. Twitter, on the other hand, supports seven Indian languages already. 

Backed by Tiger Global, Blume Ventures, Mirae Asset Management, 3One4 Capital, Accel and others, the social media platform is currently valued at over $100 Mn. It currently has over 15 Mn users with 5 Mn added in the second quarter of FY22. It has also reportedly ventured into the Nigerian market and plans to expand across Southeast Asia as well. 

Its parent company, Bombinate Technologies, also operates the Indian language Q&A platform Vokal.

The 3767 number of complaints Koo received now is a sharp increase over some previous months. As it removed more than 1,977 posts in October—-1,203 based on content reporting by users and 687 based on proactive moderation.

According to Koo’s compliance report of December 2021, of all the complaints it received, it removed 527 and took other actions such as blurring of the specific post, etc. against another 3420 posts. 

The social media platform also has a system for proactive content moderation which flagged more than 3,620 posts, among which 89 were removed and action taken against another 3,531 posts. 

Koo also received spam reports against 276 posts, of which blocked 43 posts and took other actions against 215 posts. Its proactive spam moderation system on the other hand was much more active with it reporting over 6,096 posts. 

But only a very few of these posts were blocked, only six, while more than 1,394 posts received some other form of action against them.