WhatsApp Banned Over 22 Lakh Indian Accounts in June: Details

More than 22 lakh Indian accounts had been banned by WhatsApp whereas 632 grievance stories had been obtained by the messaging platform in June, as per its report titled ‘India Monthly Report underneath the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021’. The report for the month of June has been printed in accordance with the IT Rules of 2021.

“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,” the WhatsApp spokesperson stated.

In its newest report on Monday, WhatsApp had 22,10,000 Indian accounts from June 1 to June 30, 2022.

“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 Spokesperson added.

WhatsApp in its newest report stated that 426 requests to ban the account and 16 grievances had been for security causes. And throughout this 64 accounts had been actioned based mostly on the stories obtained.

In its report, underneath ‘How WhatsApp Tackles Abuse’, it stated, “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.”

It additional added that abuse detection operates at three levels of an account’s life-style — at registration, throughout messaging, and in response to destructive suggestions, which it receives within the type of consumer stories and blocks.

“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,” it added.