How language, culture, and geography shape online dialogue: Insights from Koo

Abstract

Founded in India in 2020, the microblogging site ‘Koo’ launched as an alternative to mainstream social media platforms, with the explicit aim of catering to non-Western communities in their vernacular languages, and capitalising on a period of tension between the Indian government and Twitter which led many users to seek Twitter-alternatives. Drawing on a near-complete dataset totalling over 71M posts and 399M user interactions, we show how Koo attracted users from several countries including India, Nigeria and Brazil, but with variable levels of sustained user engagement. We highlight how Koo’s interaction network was shaped by multiple country-specific migrations displaying strong divides between linguistic and cultural communities, for instance, with English-speaking communities from India and Nigeria largely isolated from one another. Finally, we analyse the content shared by different linguistic communities and identify cultural patterns which, we speculate, promoted similar discourses across language groups. Our results show that for language groups of similar sizes, Indian languages fostered higher discourse diversity than non-Indian languages, possibly highlighting synergistic effects which boosted the uptake and retention of these groups. Despite this, Koo failed to capitalise on this synergy and ceased operations in July 2024. With this context, our study points to some of the possible reasons why the multilingual and politically diverse platform Koo struggled to remain sustainable, failing to stave off competition from its US-based competitors, despite its commitment to cultivating support for the different vernacular communities of Indian social media users.