Koo takes the Facebook route, set to launch advisory board

Koo CEO Aprameya Radhakrishna said the advisory board is expected to comprise five to 11 eminent individuals from judiciary, bureaucracy, media and business who will play a guiding role “especially when it comes to ambiguous scenarios regarding content”. It is expected to be constituted in about one or two quarters.

The company has been growing at a fast clip over the past few years and expanding significantly in regional languages. It is also looking to hire fact checkers to tackle the menace of misinformation.

The Facebook Oversight Board, which comprises 20 independent members from around the world, makes binding decisions on what content Facebook and Instagram should allow or remove, based on respect for freedom of expression and human rights, the company said on its website.

“Koo is democratising the entire thing of what is accepted or not accepted,” said Radhakrishna. “Koo will not be a judge of it, the relevant regulatory authority will. We will also enable an advisory board that will consist of a lot of eminent people and we’ll make sure that we have some kind of combination of people who have had the experience of seeing so many different instances to also guide us on what needs to be done in such scenarios.”

He said the board will be an independent, transparent, self-governing council that will establish Koo’s positioning on significant issues of content moderation that are referred to the board. It will act as a central body advising and guiding the company by providing independent decisions, opinions and guidance on Koo’s content moderation policies with the specific context of India in mind. While the board would set the ‘tone and tenor’ of content moderation, it will not be involved in day-to-day affairs. However, just as in the case of the Facebook Oversight Board, experts raised concerns about whether such an entity would be effective.

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“The Facebook Oversight Board has not been as effective as it was being projected to be,” said Salman Waris, partner head of TMT (telecom, media and technology) and IP practice at TechLegis. “It has passed some controversial judgments as well. Koo setting up an advisory board is a welcome move as it brings in self-regulation but we will have to see if this body is one with real power or is a toothless entity.”

The app has 20 million downloads and wants to aggressively expand in India. Radhakrishna said that Koo is not concerned about competition from Twitter as the platform has a high percentage of English readers while Koo is focused on local language readers for growth and adoption.

Koo is also testing a feature that will provide users with third-party fact checkers for the purpose of authenticating information. Currently, there are 20 fact checkers, of which the company has signed memorandums of understanding with some like the Press Information Bureau (PIB), while talks are on with other independent fact checkers.

This feature is expected to go live in the next quarter, said Radhakrishna. “We want to give users the ability to fact check for themselves,” he said. “We will allow users to access various fact checkers that we would have enlisted on the platform. So you’ll have 20 fact checkers, some free and some paid, and you can submit to multiple of those and get them to label that particular Koo as fact checked. And once one person has done this for one piece of content, then that label is available for everybody else to see.”