Is Koo leaning to the Right? Well, you couldn’t be more wrong!

Here are some facts you should read before you buy what some media feed you.

Koo was started to enable people to talk in their language. With the vision of uniting the world, despite its language barriers. Most social platforms are largely in English, whereas just 20% of the world speaks in English. 80% of the world speaks 1000s of different languages. They had no easy way to express themselves in their native language or find other such language speakers on the internet. Koo wanted to make this easy. And then enable everyone to talk to each other irrespective of their language.

Koo has built many features that deeply enable this vision of uniting the world.

What does Koo stand for?

How Koo got famous

In Feb 2021 Twitter got into a spat with the Indian Government for flouting Indian laws. The Government opposed these moves vehemently to avoid an environment of mass violence during the farmer protests. Twitter denied following these requests, even though the law clearly states that platforms must follow legal and Government laws to enable them to control events related to national security, law and order. It’s at such a time when many in the Government created accounts on Koo. A clear message needed to be sent to Twitter — respect the local laws else we will use locally-made alternative platforms.

Millions of users in India got to know about Koo and created accounts. They started using it as a strong alternative to Twitter. They realised that Koo had many features and interesting flows that Twitter didn’t. Especially the focus on enabling deeper connects and communication in native languages.

Today Koo boasts of over 50 million downloads and houses a variety of users from all walks of life and beliefs. They engage over 1000s of different topics every day and get huge traction on their posts.

It’s unfortunate that some journalists talk about Koo being right leaning. Twitter started up by catering to the entrepreneur and startup community, but we wouldn’t call it a startup-oriented micro-blog today, would we? Platforms evolve into larger organisms to host people and communities with varied interests. That’s what Koo represents today as it gains its place in the world as the second largest micro-blog available to the world.

As far as politics is concerned, Koo is apolitical. It has no views of its own and takes no sides. We have clear community guidelines and principles we follow world over and are transparent about our beliefs. We believe in freedom of speech as much as we believe in being responsible and honesty in speech. It’s OK to have a difference in opinion if our facts remain facts, and not lies or misinformation. We have a zero-tolerance policy towards such posts and they are taken down immediately upon identification.

For those who say that Koo is right leaning, we wonder their basis for such statements. Some media throw the same misinformation and fake news towards us that they want us to handle otherwise on our platform. In India there are 20+ opposition parties on the platform and thousands of leaders from such parties. Koo was created for humanity. Not to serve the interests of a few. That’s what it aims to do globally. Unite humanity, despite its language barriers.

If you are keen to more about what we believe in, read on.

What does Koo stand for?

Uniting the World despite the language barriers

Koo is all about uniting the world despite the language barriers. The dream of one world. Globally connected citizens of this world. The world is divided by borders and languages. There’s little that can be done about the borders. But we certainly can break the language barriers. That’s what Koo’s mission is.

How will Koo achieve this?

Koo does various things to make this mission come to life:

• Enables users to select a language when they enter the app
• Shows all the app instructions in that language
• Shows users an unending list of creators in that language
• Give creators the ability to create in their native language through language enabled keyboards
• Give creators the power to post the same message in multiple global language on one screen with our Multi-Lingual Kooing feature (patent pending product flow)
• Shows users the post in all the languages
• Enables users to translate any message using the translation functionality

This opens the world to communicate and connect with each other like never before.

Koo’s views on social media

Social media has two words. Social and media. And social comes before media. We have seen one sided media before social media came into our lives. The one-sided media would share news with us and we would consume it in a newspaper, channel or a website. But we couldn’t respond or share our views on it. Then came social. And changed the way people consumed information and interacted. These became networks of high trust because people were getting news, information, and knowledge from people they knew, followed, and trusted.

We believe that social media is all about the people. Irrespective of the ownership structure. Social media belongs to the people. True people power should be reflected on a social platform. Social media can’t be about the company itself or the owner or any other third party, other than the people themselves. Even though social media companies of our age are owned by owner driven organizations, they must act the way a public service should. They need to be answerable and serve the people at large. They need to be neutral, transparent, and fair. Everything they do should be known to people — be it the algorithms, or rules for verification, or content moderation reasons. Any company that serves society at large owes this to the society.

How are decisions made?

All decisions at Koo are made with one simple criteria: Do what’s best for the user. If something is not good for the users, it’s not executed. Be it world leaders, governments, or celebrities, they all depend on the power of the people that elect them or celebrate them. We believe that nothing is bigger than people power. And that’s who Koo values the most.

You will notice that many celebrities are excited about getting verified on a platform and getting a tick mark of various colours without realizing that the true reason to do it is to help users. Without granting the tick, the users will land up following the wrong celebrity / eminent personality. Which is the main reason why even Koo grants a yellow tick to eminent personalities. Because it’s good for the user.

Koo will be used across the globe soon and as part of being a responsible global citizen, it’s important to respect the local cultures and blend in by following cultural nuances by the legal authorities. They know what’s best and the only way to respect a region is to respect the laws. Koo ensures that it follows local guidelines for social platforms.

In countries where the laws are grey, Koo follows the principles outlined by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its community guidelines.

Freedom of speech & expression

Koo believes in freedom of speech. And the responsibilities that come with this freedom. What’s the core responsibility? To be truthful. It’s ok to have an opinion that goes against the grain. In fact true supporters of freedom to speech need to defend the people that go against the grain even if it’s a majority of one. They deserve to be heard if what they are saying is truthful. There should be no place for misinformation and false news in our society. While it’s an unavoidable reality of our lives and as entrenched in our online world as rumors are a part of our offline world. While we do our best to fight these demons, it’s important to realize that it’s a joint responsibility and best fought together as a society than being made the platform’s headache. Together we can fight it better than individually.

We believe that all of us are equal. We all have the right to be, have access, grow and be the best versions of ourselves and that the internet should be harnessed to the best of its potential to enable that for every world citizen. Users must not be charged for such access, especially to prove that they are human. We will never charge for things like identity proof or access to information. We will use other means of monetization, such as advertising or driving value to other stakeholders, to subsidize free access to people for all of time.

What we believe

Here are some things that we think are crucial and form the backbone of our existence:

• People power: A public platform like this is about the people. Not about the platform. Every decision is always made using a user first lens. The collective good of the people is given more importance than the benefit of a smaller section.
• Languages: People connect better in their ownlanguage. It’s important for a micro-blog to enable expression, consumption (either through the language or translation services) and discovery of people in languages.
• One world: We believe that everything done should help close the gaps in the the world, rather than divide it. This includes bridging the language barrier.
• Content moderation: We believe that the laws of the land must be followed as far as content moderation is concerned. Why? Because nations know their cultural and legal context better than a platform based out of another country. We think it’s disrespectful to create your own legal structures based on a superficial understanding of a country’s context. We can’t deem something illegal if the country’s laws don’t believe so and vice versa. We want to operate out of respect for local laws.
• Neutrality: This means that the platform doesn’t slap its own views on users. It’s neutral in its operations. A platform needs to be about the people. Not about itself and its interests. Which means that the platform will never influence a user’s choices or decisions.
• Transparency: We believe that users should know everything that goes on the platform so that they can operate on it with utmost trust. They need to know the algorithms, policies, community guidelines, rules to get an eminence tick mark etc. They need to know before they can trust. We publish all of these clearly on our website to drive this value system within our community and internally.
• Fairness: Fairness is about having a rule that is either just or unjust to all. It’s about having the same rules for everyone. And to be respectful to people. We believe that people can make mistakes. We never penalize a user for mistakes made. We deal with the mistake instead of dealing with the user. Unless there was a very clear harm to the larger good. Very rarely do users get banned on this platform. We deal with the content. Not the user.
• Free access for all: We want to provide access to our service for free, without having to charge users for this valuable access. We will introduce monetisation methods that help subsidise this access, either through advertising or through in-app transactions that help users appreciate the content of creators. Access alone will not be monetised.
• Shared success: We believe that everyone should benefit from using the platform. Not just the platform. If the platform earns revenue, every stakeholder involved also should. Be it the creator or the user. Everyone should make money. We are on our path to create these streams that will enable this going forward so that the platform can respect the time and involvement from the users and creators, alike.

We welcome you to Koo, the world’s largest democracy. It’s for the people. All of us. Irrespective of who we are, where we come from, who we worship or what we believe in. It’s for all of us!