Taking on Twitter

After foreign tweets on Indian developments led to controversy, the government has reacted to Twitter on Koo, a homegrown micro-blogging site. Having two platforms will cool down passions

- Na Vijayashankar

AN interesting development took place on social media recently. Twitter put out a message on its blog addressed to the government, and this was responded to on Koo, an Indian microblogging app.

The latest surge of people moving to Koo started in the first week of February 2021. A stage was reached where TV news anchors popularised the use of Twitter for discussion of political debates. I had then advocated that the time had come to switch to an Indian blogging app.

Now the new trend is “Watch Twitter” and “Post on Koo”. Over a period of time, this will create one stream of opinion on Koo, while the other may continue on Twitter. If somebody wants to respond on one platform, they have to at least view the other one too. Perhaps common hashtags will be used on both platforms for debating. This is a strange situation where both may see an increase in hits. But the number of active users on Twitter and re-tweets could see a significant downtrend. Twitter will remain predominantly a medium to reach audiences outside India, while Koo would be the preferred platform to reach out to an Indian audience.

For a long time, terrorists in India have misused freedom of speech guaranteed under the Constitution. Similarly, we will see many Twitter handles now being used to criticise Twitter and perhaps many Koo handles to criticise Koo.