Twitter Suspends the Account of Indian Microblogging Site Koo

Twitter has suspended the account of its Indian rival microblogging site Koo, Mayank Bidawatka, the co-founder of the Indian platform, has said.

The suspension of @kooeminence’s account on Friday came in the wake of Twitter suspending the social media accounts of several journalists from American media organizations such as The New York Times, CNN and Washington Post.

Twitter’s billionaire owner Elon Musk accused the journalists of posting his “assassination coordinates.” On Thursday, Twitter changed its policy on sharing “live location information” and suspended the account of @ElonJet, which had been using publicly available flight data to share the location of Musk’s private jet.

“Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” Musk tweeted on Thursday.

In a series of tweets, Bidawatka questioned the logic of Musk’s recent actions, including the banning of Koo’s social media platform. He accused Musk of “shooting the messenger” over Twitter’s suspension of journalists’ handles.

“Journalists that posted links did nothing wrong. Posting a link to publicly available info isn't doxxing the way posting a link to an online article isn't plagiarism,” Bidawatka stated.

He further accused Musk of “creating policies out of thin air” and urged journalists and media organizations to “migrate” from Twitter to Koo.

The Indian businessman said that unlike Twitter, everything on Koo is “focused and transparent.”

He also questioned Twitter over its decision to ban the account of Mastodon, another social media rival of Twitter.

“I mean seriously. How much more control does the guy need?” Bidawatka said.

Aprameya Radhakrishna , the CEO and co-founder of Koo, has said that Koo’s social media handle was banned for preventing the Indian microblogging site from competing with Twitter.