NEW DelHI – In early October, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party began signing on social media.
“Now I’m in Koo,” said India’s Minister of Commerce shipped on Twitter for its nearly 10 million followers. “Connect with me on this small Indian platform for real, fun and selective updates.” Millions of people, many of them former BJP supporters, followed, and Twitter’s profile was immediately hit, which was posted by more than 2 million people in 10 days earlier this month, according to Sensor Tower.
Time did not happen by accident. For several days, the Indian government has been cracking down on Twitter, which has challenged the rule of law block reports on the Hindu state of India, including the media and research journal. In response, the IT ministry in India intimidation sending Twitter officials to jail. Amid the controversy, government officials praised Koo as a racist, powerless American option.
This site, which calls itself “Indian words in Indian languages”It’s almost exactly like Twitter, except that” Koos “is only listed at 400, a section with headlines full of government lies, and the sign is a yellow bird, not a blue one.
Seriously, in Koo, Hindu oppression is rampant, and hate speech against Muslims, which is very rare in India, flows freely, led by some of the most powerful government listeners.
A BJP party official wrote a survey asking his followers to vote on four anti-Muslim slogans, including “anti-citizen” and “jihadi dogs”. A man who has a history of teaching at the Indian Institute of Technology, a high-tech college whose graduates envy the Silicon Valley, shared a nasty joke portraying Muslim men as members of violent bloodshed. Some people share a conspiracy to claim that Muslims spit out food from people to spread disease, while others tell stories about cases in which people with Muslim names try to tempt demons. One man warned Muslims not to follow him and called them slurs. “I hate [them], ”One of his notes said.
Like the global internet walls, as well as major platforms such as Facebook and Twitter One place against states and enough avoid hate speech, the chosen methods are beginning to take place, which experts say is increasing.
“This is about finding new homes,” evelyn douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who studies online law online, told BuzzFeed News. Hate speech, information sharing, harassment, and arousal that people have been suffering for for years is a challenge on a platform like Koo, he said, because those pages are under little supervision. “These problems come on every platform in the end,” said Douek, “but with the sheer number of alternatives, there can be less interest and compulsion.
Aprameya Radhakrishna, Koo’s chief founder and CEO, told BuzzFeed News that his page was not like a hate car or a booth.
“You can’t sort everything on the page,” he said.
Radhakrishna is a Bangalore businessman who sold the start-up Ola, an Indian partner at Uber, in 2015 for $ 200 million. He founded Koo in March last year. Earlier this month, the downturn began, the company raised $ 4.1 Million from investors, including former Infosys Mohandas Pai, a major supporter of the Modi government.
Koo has no management team, Radhakrishna said. Instead, the platform relies on people to write down what they think is the hardest part. The group only focuses on what Radhakrishna calls “exception.”
“Even Facebook and Twitter are still waiting a bit,” Radhakrishna said. “We are a 10-year-old company. We are applying our principles. He asserted that his confession had been obtained through torture and that his confession had been obtained through torture.
“We can’t do anything about something because we feel it,” he said. “It is taken in accordance with the laws of the land.”
A small section called “Rules and Conditions” installed during the program prohibits individuals from posting material that “violates another’s privacy,” “hate,” “racist” or “racist,” or “insulting.”
Although comparison for Parler, who has established himself as a way to manage Twitter and Facebook in the US, Radhakrishna insists his program is politically neutral. “We would love anyone who wants to take the platform to the next level,” he said. “We are not the only politicians in India. The platform is designed to explain and explain everything. ”
More than a dozen in Indian state governments now use Koo. Earlier this month, the IT ministry, a government department that threatened Twitter officials with imprisonment, wrote a statement to Koo expressing dissatisfaction with Twitter hours before posting the same statement on Twitter, a platform designated by the department.
Inside Twitter, which ranks India in the fastest growing markets around the world, staff are keeping a close eye on Koo. “Obviously it’s on our radar,” an employee who asked not to be identified, told BuzzFeed News. “I don’t know if it’s going to be dangerous, but we’re seeing it.”
Radhakrishna said the company’s startup made this possible. “We are an Indian company and we are launching our operations in favor of the Indians,” he said. “This will be better than what foreign companies do because they are also governed by the house rules they have made.”
Asked what he meant by “Indians,” Radhakrishna said he had no concrete examples. “I haven’t had any problems,” he said.
