Koo launches voluntary identification feature for general users - a first in social media

Indian microblogging platform Koo, which is available in 10 Indian languages, has gained immense popularity in recent years. The application had touched about 20 million downloads by the end of 2021, according to an article by BBC. Koo has recently launched a voluntary identification feature for general users - a step towards bringing innovation to the social media landscape.

In a recent conversation with YourStory’s Daily Dispatch powered by HSBC, Aprameya Radhakrishna, Co-founder and CEO, Koo App touched upon the latest move, saying this feature has been launched to solve the existing uncertainty in the social media landscape on real vs fake.

“Our effort is to keep going in the direction of bringing transparency, consistency and reality into social media,” he shares. This feature will allow any user to verify their identity on the platform and when they do that, a green tick will be placed against their name. However, it is completely voluntary – if users want to verify, they can do it.

He adds that as a part of their efforts to become more transparent, Koo will be releasing its algorithms to the public- something that no social media platform has ever done as well.

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“Giving the ability to people to self-verify themselves as real people voluntarily and as well as opening up our entire algorithms to the public, both of these things are being done for the first time on social media. None of the other social media platforms across the world have done it. Happy to be doing it as an Indian social media platform,” says Aprameya.

In terms of the traction and number of users, he says that people will always prefer a real company and this feature is Koo’s step towards being more real than anyone else. This is expected to encourage more people to join the platform. “We are expecting millions of people to join,” shares Aprameya.

“All our efforts are to accelerate towards 100 million downloads as soon as possible,” says Aprameya.

While speaking about overseas expansion, he shares that global presence is not a priority, but it is on the agenda. Koo currently has a test market in Nigeria with which they are experimenting and learning, and they plan on eventually moving to other countries as well. However, their primary focus continues to be on India.

Koo is not looking to raise funds for now. Building the product and growing is what’s on the priority list for the company. Lastly, Aprameya shares that they intend to keep “creators” at the center of their operations.