Amid Twitter chaos, Koo offers to migrate historic tweets to escape 'intellectual assassination'

Koo -- the Made-in-India rival of Twitter -- has offered to migrate all historic tweets of any Twitter user willing to shift to its platform that will continue to not charge users for verification badge, its co-founder and CEO Aprameya Radhakrishna said.

Since taking over Twitter in a USD 44 billion deal in October, Elon Musk has sacked its employees, overhauled its moderation policies, put a price for account verification, and restored previously banned accounts including that of former US President Donald Trump.

In recent days, he suspended the accounts of several prominent journalists without warning who had been covering him, but had to reinstate the accounts following strong criticism from government officials, journalist organisations, and advocacy groups.

Koo, which allows users to express views in Indian languages, has already crossed 50 million downloads and is now flying into the rival's nest, starting a campaign to woo Twitter users, offering self-verification and a free-of-cost yellow verification tag for eminent persons.

And now, it has offered to migrate any tweet, excluding replies, likes or resharing of someone else's tweet, to Koo to escape "intellectual assassination" resulting from Twitter account suspension, he said.

"A lot has happened in the 45 odd days since the world's town square became one man's megaphone," Radhakrishna told PTI saying Twitter is now a "personal property of the world's smartest and richest man".

"If you are someone who speaks their mind and engages with others in discussion and debate - a suspension essentially means that you lose access to years of creativity, ideas, connections and insights," he said.

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Radhakrishna said Koo has devised a simple and elegant solution to escape this "blackhole". "Just migrate to Koo!" "Within the settings, a simple and elegant button allows you to migrate all your Tweets to Koo."

"Just click on the migrate button, follow the simple on screen instructions and all your tweets are ported to your Koo account seamlessly."

All historic original tweets will get migrated to Koo, he said. Also, all accounts that the migrating user may be following on Twitter, and if available on Koo, can be followed by a simple click.

However, followers of the migrating Twitter user will not get migrated unless they also shift to Koo.

"You can look up your friends and followers on Koo and start engaging with them," he said.