While
Twitter finds itself in a prolonged standoff with the Indian government over the company's refusal to take down certain accounts, a senior executive of a very similar Indian social network says the sudden attention on his app has been "overwhelming." "It feels like ... you've just been put in the finals of the World Cup suddenly and everyone's watching you and the team," Mayank Bidawatka, co-founder of Koo, told CNN Business.
Koo, touted by India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi and used enthusiastically by several officials and ministries in his government, has been downloaded 3.3 million times so far this year, per app analytics firm Sensor Tower. It's a promising start for a company founded less than a year ago, but less than Twitter's 4.2 million Indian downloads during the same period.
However, the Indian social network, which sports a bird logo familiar to any Twitter user, was downloaded more times than Twitter in the month of February — when the Indian government called out the US company for not doing enough to block accounts sharing what it called "incendiary and baseless" hashtags around a protest by farmers against new agricultural laws.
