WhatsApp Banned Over 22 Lakh Indian Accounts in June, 632 Grievance Reports Received: Details

More than 22 lakh Indian accounts were banned by WhatsApp while 632 grievance reports were received by the messaging platform in June, as per its report titled ‘India Monthly Report under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021’. The report for the month of June has been published 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 said.

In its latest 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 latest report said that 426 requests to ban the account and 16 grievances were for safety reasons. And during this 64 accounts were actioned based on the reports received.

In its report, under ‘How WhatsApp Tackles Abuse’, it 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.”

It further added that abuse detection operates at three stages of an account’s lifestyle — at registration, during messaging, and in response to negative feedback, which it receives in the form of user reports 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.