Koo a secondary platform for many political leaders

Team of researchers compares content trends of politicians on microblogging platforms

A large number of Indian politicians are using Koo, the India-founded microblogging app, as a secondary platform, and over three-quarters of the handles analysed not only mirror content posted on Twitter, but also most of this content is generated there, a team of researchers has concluded.

The analysis was embarked upon by Ponnurangam Kumaraguru from the International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIIT-H) and Joyojeet Pal from the University of Michigan, along with students from Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi, and IIIT-H.

The team explored information taken from a 2019 General Elections dataset, analysed over 1,400 handles, and compared trends with their corresponding Twitter handles, given that they use this microblogging platform to reach out to their online constituents or the media. They then mapped content on each social media platform separately. While they found that a small number of politicians generate content on Koo first, conversely, it was also noticed that politicians post on Twitter first and then on Koo, with an average time difference of 42.22 minutes.

From the analysed timelines of politicians, only two major leaders, Piyush Goyal and Giriraj Singh used Koo before Twitter in over 10% of instances, the team noted.

The team also found that an overwhelming number of politicians on Koo were from the Bharatiya Janata Party. Congress and Aam Aadmi Party leaders came a distant second and third, respectively.

“We took the handles of anybody who is a politician from the Lok Sabha election dataset which we had previously worked on. The analysis says that of the 1,408 handles of politicians, 74.1% are from the BJP, and them accounting for 93.41% of posts across politicians basically means that they are very active of Koo. Roughly 7% of the content is generated by somebody else,” says Prof Kumaraguru, adding that team wanted to study how Koo, which recently reached 1-crore users mark, is doing as compared with Twitter. Around 78% of the content generated by politicians is very close to their content of their tweets.

Prof Kumaraguru opines that the trends of using microblogging platforms are contingent on the network effect and reach.