ShareChat Received 5.6 Mn User Complaints In Feb 2022, Reveals Compliance Report

Indian content sharing platform ShareChat today published its monthly compliance report for the month of February .

The social media platform received 11 requests from law enforcement agencies to take down user content. 

Giving the breakdown of the data, ShareChat said that action was taken on 8 requests where user data was submitted. Based on the requests of agencies, 2 requests were executed for violation of community guidelines. 

The action was taken in the form of suspension of account and or content after user data was shared with the platform.

Additionally, ShareChat received over 56,81,213 user complaints during February this year. The complaints were submitted via various reporting mechanisms available on the platform. This data included complaints against erring user profiles as well as individual content for violation of community standards.

Most of the user complaints were clubbed under the unspecified ‘Others’ sub-category (30.1%). This was followed closely by issues pertaining to abusive language by users which formed 27.59% of the total complaints. The next biggest chunk of complaints was related to ‘No category’ (8.88%), sexually explicit content (6.81%) and spam (6.35%).

ShareChat has a grievance redressal mechanism under which users can file their complaints under any one of the 22 sub-categories.

The content sharing platform also took down 2.8 Mn content pieces for allegedly flouting community guidelines. These included 2.5 Mn pieces of user-generated content and sexual content amounting to 1.8 Lakh pieces. More than 87,000 comments and 771 chat rooms  were also deleted during the course of February this year. In addition, ShareChat also took down 58,000 pieces of content for alleged copyright infringement. 

ShareChat also collated data of users banned from the platform. The bans were imposed across three broad categories – User Generated Content (UGC) ban where the user cannot post any content for a specified duration, edit profile ban where the user cannot edit any profile attributes for a specified time period and comment ban where user is banned from commenting on any post for ban duration.

The duration of these bans range from one day to 360 days, depending on the severity of the complaint. The platform imposed a ‘permanent’ UGC ban on 9,019 user accounts in February. The ‘permanent’ ban is only restricted to a period of 360 days. ‘Edit Profile ban’ was imposed on 8,936 accounts and ‘Comment ban’ was imposed on 8,943 accounts.

Meta (formerly Facebook), in its latest compliance report, stated that it took action against more than 23.4 Mn pieces of content, primarily for spam and violent and graphic content, among others. 

Meta-owned instant messaging platform WhatsApp also banned.1.4 Mn accounts between February 1 and 28. Additionally, Google also removed 93,067 pieces of bad content based on user complaints in February this year.