Koo Removed 2,654 Posts Including 190 Spam Content in August

India’s Twitter alternative Koo has published its third compliance report for August in adherence to the New IT Rules, 2021. Overall, Koo removed 2,654 posts during the month — 1,244 based on content reporting by users, 1,220 based on proactive moderation, 45 spam content based on user reporting and 145 spam posts/accounts based on proactive moderation.

This is the first time Koo has revealed details of spam content in three months of filing the compliance statement as per the new IT Rules, 2021.

Further, it also proactively took ‘other actions’ such as overlay, blurring, ignoring, warning and more against 3,249 posts based on user reports, and 37,236 posts through self-moderation.

The platform hid and/or blacklisted 939 spam accounts based on user reports and 4,907 accounts through self-moderation.

Koo has claimed to have moderated almost 49K posts before taking down 5.4% of these. It has moderated 69K posts in July before taking down 2.9% of them.

Overall, 69K posts were impacted in July and 59K in June. Until last month, the company only revealed content moderation statistics but this time, it has also specified the number of spam content/accounts from August 1 to August 31.

Founded in March 2020 by Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka, Koo is a ‘Make in India’ microblogging platform. It is available in eight Indian languages including Hindi, Kannada and Marathi, among others.

Backed by Tiger Global, Blume Ventures, Mirae Asset Management, 3One4 Capital and Accel, among others, Koo’s parent company, Bombinate Technologies, also operates the Indian language knowledge-sharing platform ‘Vokal’.

The startup grew prominent after winning the ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat App’ challenge in 2020. However, it only garnered more users when then IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad joined the platform.

Later, many prominent government authorities such as Union Minister Piyush Goyal; self-proclaimed priest Sadhguru; cricketers Anil Kumble and Javagal Srinath; CN Ashwathnarayan, Minister of Science & Technology; G Parameshwara, Deputy CM of Karnataka; Karnataka MP Tejasvi Surya; actors Ashutosh Rana, Ashish Vidyarthi and many IAS officers, actors, actresses and sports personalities joined the platform.

Need For A Monthly Compliance Report

The compliance report has to be filed under the Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code, Rules 2021, that came into effect on May 25, 2021. Koo claimed to be the first social media intermediary platform to have complied with the intermediary guidelines, and the second company after Google to file a compliance report the very next month.

As per the Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code, Rules 2021, social media intermediaries with users of more than 5 Mn in India have to publish compliance reports per month. Bengaluru-based Koo boasted over 6 Mn users in May 2021.

Apart from these, these platforms had to appoint:

• a chief grievance officer for addressing all complaints
• a chief compliance officer to ensure that digital media intermediaries are operating in compliance with the rules, and
• a nodal person of contact for 24×7 coordination with law enforcement agencies.

All three posts need to be held by Indian citizens. These platforms also have to take down posts within 36 hours after receiving court orders or instructions from a government agency.