The Koo Code

In a freewheeling conversation with BW Businessworld, Phaneesh Gururaj (Chief Technology Officer at Koo) reveals the inner workings of the popular social media platform, Koo.

Edited Excerpts:

What does content moderation entail at Koo?

We follow laws of the land. And our policies are based on that. Since we are an intermediary, we look at content that cannot be shown on our platform which is governed by certain rules. In certain cases, we also consider content that are extremely inappropriate in terms of videos, which gets flagged. There are specific rules which we follow. For these rules, there are specific algorithms/models that we use to identify content as appropriate or inappropriate.

In terms of the algorithms, we have been one of the pioneers as we have open-sourced our algorithms. So, the users know how our algorithms are built. The users can apply their logic to see if there is any bias setting in.

By being very open, it's very simple for Koo to set it up in terms of how our algorithms work. At the same time, we give users flexibility in terms of what content they want to follow, what content they do not want to follow in a very simple way. If a user opts to being not interested in some specific topic, we ensure that the content never comes to that user. That’s been our philosophy – to be inclusive, open and work closely with the laws of the land.

Could you tell us about the work that happens at Koo Lab?

The engineering team at Koo is working on some very cutting-edge technologies in the mobile space, search engineering, video engineering, AI/ML and even DevOps. We use state-of-the-art technology at Koo. India has more almost 600 million internet users and the number will grow to 900 million users as we move forward. At Koo Lab, our team is building products and features as well as the technology platform, to address this segment.

Koo is multilingual platform and there's a lot of thought that has gone into it. Right now, we support 10 Indian languages. To ensure that all these languages work well without losing the core essence, we keep enhancing the platform. And the only way that happens is by doing lot of research. 

Because of the scale we operate at, we look into a lot of different kinds of databases and we invest a lot in data stores. For example, there are graph data stores that we need to leverage and analytics data stores, where we need to understand a large corpus of data. There are data stores for AI/ML and also vector databases, which understand a slightly different format. Koo Lab looks into some of these active research areas and there's a lot of work that happens here to equip ourselves to build these features at scale.

And last but not the least, we have the core mobile engineering, which helps the Android or iOS app, or the website adopt some of the best UX designs. We look at the guidelines provided by Android and iOS. We are now moving towards more UI-driven architecture in terms of how content can be experienced in different formats including video, audio and image. Additionally, we also have different languages. So, we do various experiments on our platform to understand how the users are responding to different form factors. And based on the right results, we double down on some features.

How important is the topic of security around social media?

Koo takes security very seriously. We have established a small security engineering team internally as well. We work and collaborate with lot of ethical hackers. We also work on crowdsourced bug bounty programs with many people. And we are also in touch with some important organisations like Cert-In to keep getting feedback on what are the new trends that are coming up in cybersecurity. 

If you look at the trend over the last one year, frequency of phishing attacks has been increasing where hackers are targeting internal employees at social media organisations to get access to platform data. To counter this we have various awareness programs. We internally call it Chaos Engineering or Chaos Security, where we try to understand these attacks by replicating them to see how people actually respond in a very controlled manner. And we use the learnings and help our internal employees to be aware of such attacks.

We also ensure that the information on Koo is coming from the right people. We have introduced Self-verification for users, which allows people to use any of the government-based tools to verify their accounts. We are the first social media company in the world come up with this type of feature. This prevents lot of bots from coming and influencing our platform. 

What are your opinions on social media platforms built on top of blockchain?

In my opinion blockchain-based social media is definitely an interesting architecture. With everything decentralised, the social media products could definitely take this route.  

Blockchain-based social media use some of the blockchain protocols. With the help of smart contracts, they are able to build certain community guidelines and build on top of it. If the community itself gets to decide what happens on the such social media platforms there needs to be some rules that the community should abide by. Certain guardrails have to be put in. Currently, it's too early to come in and comment on whether social media platform can be scaled, built and monetised on top of a blockchain. But my feeling says it might take some more time before the overall ecosystems are ready to adopt something like this.