WhatsApp Banned Over 2.2 Million Indian Accounts In June

Over 2.2 million Indian accounts were banned by WhatsApp in the month of June, according to a company report titled ‘India Monthly Report under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021’.

The messaging platform also informed that it received 632 grievance reports in that time. The company added that the report for the month of June has been published in accordance with the IT Rules of 2021.

A WhatsApp spokesperson said, “WhatsApp is an industry leader in preventing abuse, among end-to-end encrypted messaging services. Over the years, we have consistently invested in Artificial Intelligence and other state-of-the-art technology, data scientists and experts, and in processes, in order to keep our users safe on our platform.”

A total of 2,210,000 Indian accounts were banned between June 1 and June 30, 2022, the company informed in its latest report.

The spokesperson said, “This user-safety report contains details of the user complaints received and the corresponding action taken by WhatsApp, as well as WhatsApp's own preventive actions to combat abuse on our platform. As captured in the latest Monthly Report, WhatsApp banned over 2.2 million accounts in the month of June.”

The messaging platform further mentioned that it received 426 reports to ban accounts and 16 grievances were for safety reasons. In addition, action was taken against 64 accounts on the basis of reports received.

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In the company’s report under the ‘How WhatsApp Tackles Abuse’ section, is said, “In addition to responding to and actioning on user complaints through the grievance channel, WhatsApp also deploys tools and resources to prevent harmful behaviour on the platform. We are particularly focused on prevention because we believe it is much better to stop harmful activity from happening in the first place than to detect it after harm has occurred.”

WhatsApp further said that the abuse detection operates at three stages of an account’s lifestyle – at registration, during messaging, and in response to negative feedback, which is received in the form of reports and blocks.

The report also mentioned , “A team of analysts augments these systems to evaluate edge cases and help improve our effectiveness over time. We have detailed our on-platform capabilities to identify and ban accounts in this white paper. The data shared below highlights the number of Indian accounts banned by WhatsApp between June 1, and 2022-June 30, 2022 using the aforementioned abuse detection approach, which also includes action taken in furtherance of negative feedback received from users via our "Report" feature.”

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