ShareChat Took Down 77K Content Pieces For Copyright Infringement In December

In accordance with the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, Indian content sharing platform ShareChat has published its monthly report for the month of December.

The social media platform received 12 requests from law enforcement agencies to take down user content. Breaking down the data, the startup said that action was taken on 9 requests where user data was submitted. The other 3 requests were executed based on violation of community guidelines. 

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

ShareChat also received over 56,18,870 user complaints during December 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 related to abusive behaviour which formed the bulk of complaints (28.46%). This was followed closely by unspecified complaints related to ‘Others’ sub-category(26.49%). The next biggest chunk of complaints were related to ‘No category’ (12.18%), Sexually explicit content (6.91%), Spam (5.92%), Fake profile (3.52%) and Inappropriate profile picture (1.64%). 

In total, the data breakdown had as many as 22 sub-categories under which users could file a complaint.

The content sharing platform also took down a slew of content pieces for flouting community guidelines. ShareChat took action against 4.7 Mn pieces of content for violating norms. The platform also took down 2.4 Lakh pieces of user generated content that was sexual in nature. As many as 130,259 comments  and 1,162 chatrooms were deleted in December. In addition to that, 77,941 pieces of content were taken down for 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 ‘permanently’ terminated 16,920 user accounts in the month of December. The ‘permanent’ ban is only restricted to a period of 360 days. ‘Edit Profile ban’ was imposed on 16,165 accounts and ‘Comment ban’ was imposed on 16,172 accounts.

In its latest transparency report, Twitter said that it received a total of 307 complaints between November 26, 2021 to December 25, 2021, a fourfold increase compared to the previous month when it received 76 complaints. 

Most of the complaints were related to IP-related infringements at around 119, followed by illegal activities at 104, among others.

In its latest compliance report for January, Meta (formerly Facebook) took action against more than 19.3 Mn pieces of content, primarily for spam (13.8 Mn). It also took action against 2.1 Mn pieces of content that were flagged for violent and graphic content, among others. 

In addition, WhatsApp, in its compliance report for December, stated that it banned over 2 Mn accounts during the same period in the country.

Microblogging platform, Koo, in its monthly compliance report for January stated that it received complaints against 4,509 posts on the platform.