Twitter on Friday suspended an official account belonging to Indian microblogging platform Koo, which had been set up for user queries. Visiting @kooeminence now shows that the account’s been suspended, and its tweets are no longer visible.
This comes in the wake of Elon Musk suspending the accounts of several prominent journalists without warning who had been covering him, including those from the Washington Post, the New York Times, Mashable, and CNN. He said that they were endangering his family. However, the accounts have been reinstated since then following strong criticism from government officials, journalism organisations, and advocacy groups.
Mayank Bidawatka, Koo co-founder, took to Twitter to express the loss of the account, emphasising that the platform is the best alternative to Twitter: “I’ve said this before. We run Koo and the journalists should just migrate. Migrate tools are available. Koo is the best alternative to Twitter. This place is what it is because of you and millions of other users like us. Let’s not fuel this guy’s ego.”
We’ve never created policies out of thin air. Everything is user focused and transparent. It’s the most inclusive platform. It’s time to take action instead of just discussing. This won’t stop here unless we make it!@oliverdarcy @tculpan @Kantrowitz
— Mayank Bidawatka (@mayankbidawatka) December 16, 2022
He also questioned the rationale behind the suspension, saying that “This isn’t democracy. This is a strong need to exercise power & control. And shouldn’t be allowed. We need to speak up!”
In a related move, Twitter is blocking users from tweeting links to some Mastodon servers. Mastodon is another major competitor to Twitter. Attempting to tweet Mastodon links causes Twitter to throw an error saying, “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.” Essentially, links to the platform are being marked as malware.
Commenting on Mastodon links being marked as unsafe, Bidawatka added, “How much more control does the guy need?”
