Twitter rival Koo introduces self-verification feature now

Bengaluru: Koo, the micro-blogging platform for Indian languages, has introduced a voluntary self-verification feature denoted by a green tick on the users’ profiles. Users can choose to authenticate themselves with a government-approved ID card. The idea is to lend credibility to genuine voices on the platform.
Koo became one of the first social media intermediaries to comply with the intermediary guidelines to enhance transparency and reliability on social media. Aprameya Radhakrishna, co-founder and CEO of Koo, said the self-verifier button will bring down abuse and online misinformation, making people responsible for posting content, with appropriate use of language. “We don’t want to live in a world of bots,” he said. The verification, he said, will be an API call from the government agency concerned, and Koo would not store information during the process. Koo has 30 million downloads currently.
Twitter has the blue verified badge that allows people to know that an account of public interest is authentic. “For the blue tick on Twitter, we have a corresponding yellow tick which is for eminent followers,” Radhakrishna said. Asked about monetisation of branded content, Radhakrishna said that has not been opened up on the platform yet. It has 6 million creators on the platform who post branded content and get paid by the advertiser.
He said the international test market is Nigeria. “Koo is planning to enter Africa, South East Asia, South America and Eastern Europe in three years,” he said.