Koo co-founder says new guidelines will help make social media 'more positive place'

Founded in March 2020 by Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka, Koo can be used to express views and opinions on various topics much like Twitter.

Koo co-founder Aprameya Radhakrishna said the government's new guidelines will help make social media a "much better, more positive place" and are a step in the right direction.

Radhakrishna told The Economic Times that among content creators, there are very few who share fake news or posts that incite violence and harm.

"So whether it is Facebook, whether it is Twitter, whether it is Koo or anybody else, we will all have to make sure that all our platforms are at the same place for the 99 percent of users who actually want to use it for the right purposes. It is for us to keep our ears to the ground and make sure that the 1 percent which actually creates havoc are treated in the right manner as per the guidelines that have been given. It is making social media a much better, more positive place," Radhakrishna said.

Also read New IT rules | Social media majors will now have to follow these strict guidelines

Koo, which was launched in March 2020, is viewed as the Indian alternative to Twitter.

Social media platforms are now required to comply with the Information Technology (Guidelines For Intermediaries And Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, which was released by the Indian government on February 25.

The regulation stipulates that social media platforms must remove content within 36 hours of a government or legal order.

Also read: What is Koo, how to download it, and why Indian ministers are moving to the Twitter alternative

"If we have to have a grievance officer, we will have to start investing in a grievance redressal mechanism and software, which we have already started on a small scale. For us, it is much smaller and so it gives us an opportunity to build the system right at the beginning," Radhakrishna told the publication.

Social media intermediaries will also now have to disclose the originator of the message or content that incited violence or affected the integrity or sovereignty of the country. For messaging services such as Signal and Facebook-owned WhatsApp, this could mean breaking end-to-end encryption that enables privacy of users.

Radhakrishna said this rule will not be a problem for Koo, since it is an open network.

"On a platform like Koo, it is publicly available already -- who is the source of all of the information, what is the initial post, who reposted it or re-Kooed it in our case-- all that is publicly available. So I do not think open networks like ours will have a problem with that," he said.