This comes a day after Tesla CEO Elon Musk snagged a seat on the Twitter board and held a poll on the platform asking users if they’d like to have an edit button option which is something that has been a widely requested feature.
“What’s interesting is that it’s been over 20 months since we’ve had the edit feature,” Mayank Bidawatka, co-founder at Koo App said while addressing a virtual press meet to launch the platform’s self-verify feature. “I don’t understand what the big deal about it is as we launched that feature just a few months after starting out because we were very focused on listening to what our users were saying.”
He said that users can edit what they have said as long as there have been no reactions on that particular Koo. “We also made it easy for them to copy that Koo and create a new one in case the Koo had reactions and they still wanted to edit it,” he added.
The company on Wednesday launched a feature where a user can self-verify their profile on the platform within seconds by using their Government-approved ID card. The company said that this move would empower users to prove the authenticity of their accounts on the platform which would then lend credibility to the thoughts and opinions that they share. Voluntary self-verification promotes visibility of genuine voices.
A visible marker in the form of a green tick will identify an account as being self-verified. Koo claimed this is the first ‘Significant Social Media Intermediary’ to enable this feature in accordance with Rule 4(7) the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.
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“Users enter the Government-ID number, enter the OTP, and on successful authentication, get self-verified with a green tick in their profile. The whole process is completed within a few seconds. The validation process is carried out by Government-authorized third-parties. Koo would not store any information during the process,” the company said in a statement.
Koo said this is to promote authenticity which it hopes will in turn result in curbing online misinformation, hate speech, abuse and bullying. In response to a query posed by ET on whether Koo would look at penalising users for the same and would be able to crackdown harder on users spreading fake news or hate, the platform said that the self-verify tool was more a social tool than a legal one.
