Elon Musk’s hostile $44-billion takeover of Twitter has made the microblogging platform a strange place to be in, to say the least. For starters, former US President Donald Trump is back on Twitter after a 22-month-long suspension (he was removed for allegedly inciting the US Capitol riots in January 2021). And so is Kanye West, who got suspended for anti-Semitic comments. Twitter’s new pay-for-blue-tick policy has led to a spate of fake ‘verified’ accounts on the platform, ranging from the likes of LeBron James to Jesus Christ (you read that right). As Musk claims that Twitter’s usage is at an all-time high, several users are migrating to other apps such as the decentralised Mastodon and the homegrown Koo, the latter of which recently forayed into the Brazilian market with overwhelming response.
Koo co-founder Mayank Bidawatka has been quite vocal against Musk and the changes he has been bringing to Koo. Following the recent mass layoffs at Twitter, Bidawatka said that Koo would hire ex-Twitter employees as “they deserve to work where their talent is valued.”
In a blog post on November 18, Bidawatka said that only 20 percent of the world speaks English. “Most global products have a broken experience in languages. Nobody has as yet created a language-immersive experience for expressing and connecting with the world. Many users asked us to enable this experience on the Internet.”
He added that Koo’s focus remained “non-English users” and that the company aimed to “keep building on the language differentiation and growing rapidly in India and across the world.”
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“People connect better in their own language,” Bidawatka added in the blog and as an extension of the same principle, Koo added the Portuguese language, marking its foray into Brazil and notching its supported native languages up to 11. Among Indian languages, Koo already supports Hindi, English, Tamil, Telugu, Assamese, Marathi, Bengali, and Gujarati.
Within 48 hours of the Brazil launch, Koo claims that it has seen over 1 million downloads in the country. It claims that its Brazilian users have posted 2 million Koos and added 10 million likes. “We are very happy to see the kind of love and support Brazil has shown us. It's great to be the top app in both the Google Play Store and Apple App Store in Brazil within 48 hours of being known in the country,” said Koo CEO and co-founder Aprameya Radhakrishna.
Riding the momentum, Brazilian celebrities such as singer Claudia Leitte, actor Babu Santana, author Rosana Hermann, as well as news portal Choquei have joined Koo.
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This is part of Koo’s global expansion plans, which also included a recent foray into the US market, which marked its first overseas market launch. The company also plans to introduce more global languages as well as launch in more countries in the coming days.
ALSO READ: Twitter Loses Thousands Of Users To Mastodon After Musk Takeover
In order to further strengthen its stand against Twitter, Koo also announced that it will soon offer the ability to import tweets and also follow Twitter lists to a Koo account, in order to enable a seamless transition. There has been no word on when this feature will roll out.
Another (hilarious) reason why Koo could be getting popular in Brazil
As per ongoing trends on social media platforms, Koo might just have a tongue-in-cheek reason to see such popularity in Brazil.
Well, in Portuguese, the word "koo" also sounds like the local slang word for "a**hole", as pointed out by some users on Twitter.
We're sure it's all in good fun, as Koo itself offered a hilarious response to the ongoing trend/query on Twitter: