With Twitter facing the heat recently from the Government of India over flagging of tweets from members of the ruling party, the controversial CEO Jack Dorsey is rumoured to have joined the Indian microblogging platform Koo.
Former fashion model Jack Dorsey co-founded Twitter with Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass in 2006 and was CEO of Twitter in phases when he was removed from the position multiple times. This speculation was finally put to rest in October 2015 when he was appointed permanent CEO of Twitter after taking over as CEO for the 3rd time in June that year.
Jack Dorsey has always courted controversy especially on matters relating to political alliance with Twitter, as a company, aligning more closely with his policies and biases on issues rather than with the rule of the land or a neutral position. There have been accusations of Twitter fuelling the Iran revolution in 2009, facilitating the Muslim Brotherhood revolution in the Middle East in 2011, meddling with the US election in 2016, and more recently interfering with the political unrest in India.
Jack Dorsey also has the distinction of losing control over his own Twitter handle twice in the past few years when his account was temporarily suspended in 2016 and also in 2019 where a cyber collective known as the Chuckling Squad hacked his account and posted white supremacist content.
Twitter has also been repeatedly accused of manipulating its algorithm to amplify or hide the impact any particular point of view is having on the platform. With the latest introduction of flagging tweets for being short on facts or considered inflammatory, they are facing a lot of flak for being one-sided. This is said to be the main point of friction in India where tweets from BJP leaders and their accounts have been flagged recently. This was only compounded by the freehand the leaders had on Koo.
Koo is the Indian version of Twitter with almost identical features including the logo which happens to be a yellow bird instead of Twitter’s blue. The Bengaluru based app was launched in 2020 after winning the Prime Ministers Atmanirbhar Challenge and boasts of native capability in Kannada, Marathi, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and English. The general tone of the app tends to be right-wing in nature with a lot of pro-establishment ideology being shared. This could be attributed to the early adopters being ministers and people associated with the Government of India and the BJP.
Read the full article at: http://thedailyvanilla.com/2021/05/26/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-joins-koo-to-rally-support-against-banning-of-twitter/