It is a mighty battle of the tweets! Koo, a home-grown Indian alternative to Twitter, has been trending amid a standoff over some dubious accounts and hashtags on the US microblogging platform.
Many Indian politicians and celebrities announced their intention to switch leanings to the India-born Koo, with one saying: “We need to make Koo global” and the Indian government’s Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MEITY) even posting an official statement on the new platform, ignoring Twitter.
The row follows an Indian government legal request for Twitter to take action against some suspect accounts, connected with extremist leanings and violence. Twitter said it had suspended more than 500 accounts that were engaging in clear examples of platform manipulation and spam, and had also taken actions on hundreds of others that breached its rules relating to the inciting of violence and abuse. Others were geo-blocked, although Twitter did not go into detail on how it made decisions on which accounts to restrict.
Twitter said: "These accounts continue to be available outside of India. Because we do not believe that the actions we have been directed to take are consistent with Indian law."
Some accounts, the Indian government claims, are backed by rival countries or operated by supporters of dangerous separatist movements.
While action has been taken on the bulk of the accounts, Twitter indicated that it could not fully comply.
"To do so, we believe, would violate their fundamental right to free expression under Indian law," Twitter said, adding that it had informed India’s technology ministry of its actions.
India's tech ministry in turn said the blog post preceded a planned meeting between its most senior official and Twitter executives that had been organised after a request from the American company.
"In this light a blog post published prior to this engagement is unusual," the ministry posted on Koo.
While this confrontation on the social media battleground continues, the question is how many Global Indians would consider switching from Twitter to Koo?
(With Reuters/ANI inputs)