By Sankalp Phartiyal

NEW DELHI, Feb 10 (Reuters) - Indian social-media app Koo iswitnessing a surge in popularity, fuelled by politicians andothers flocking to it after U.S. rival Twitter Increfused to follow a government order to block certain content onits platform.

Twitter has locked horns with New Delhi this month over theorder to remove more than 1,100 accounts and posts which thegovernment says are spreading misinformation about farmerprotests against new agricultural laws.

The dispute escalated on Wednesday when Twitter said it didnot fully comply with some requests as it believed they were notin line with Indian law.

Koo said downloads had surged 10-fold in the past two daysto over 3 million. Meanwhile #kooapp was the top Twitter trendin India on Wednesday with nearly 21,000 posts, followed by#BanTwitter.

WHAT IS KOO?

Koo is a Twitter-like micro-blogging platform which allowsusers to post multimedia content, including audio clips. A textpost is restricted to 400 characters and the service supportssix Indian languages, including English.

Like Twitter, Koo's logo is a bird, though yellow in colour.It allows users to use hashtags (#) or the "@" symbol formentions. The app also allows users to 're-koo', Koo's versionof a retweet and chat instead of a direct message.

HOW DID IT START?

Koo was founded by Aprameya Radhakrishna and MayankBidawatka, both MBA, or business management, graduates. The duoare also the founders of Vokal, an audio-video knowledge-sharingplatform similar to Quora.

The app was launched in March 2020, and won an governmentaward for driving tech innovation. It raised more than $4million in funding last week from new and existing investorsincluding venture capital firms Accel and 3one4 Capital.

WHO IS ON KOO

For years, Twitter has been a major public communicationtool for the Indian government. But several ministries andhigh-profile figures, including Bollywood actors, have alsogradually begun using Koo in recent months. The technologyministry and trade minister Piyush Goyal joined this month.

Koo is however still dwarfed by Twitter, which had 17.5million users in India as of last month, its third highest userbase after the United States and Japan, according to Germandatabase firm Statista.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is yet to join Koo, spokeabout the app last year in his monthly radio address. "It'scalled Koo," he said. "In this, we can place our opinion andinteract in our mother tongue through text, video or audio."

WHAT ITS FOUNDERS SAY

The sudden increase in Koo's popularity can be compared insome respects to the surge in the use of digital payments appsin India following a ban on high-value currency notes in late2016, Koo's co-founder Bidawatka told Reuters.

"You could say this is something similar, because a certainevent happened and lot of people want to move here... There is asurge at an unexpected time and lots of people are talking aboutus."

Radhakrishna posted a hiring alert for engineers on LinkedInon Wednesday.(Reporting by Sankalp Phartiyal; Editing by Pravin Char)