ShareChat Took Down Over 4 Mn Content Pieces & Deleted 1.3K Chat Rooms In January

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

The social media platform received 19 requests from law enforcement agencies to take down user content. 

Providing the breakdown of the data, ShareChat said that action was taken on 17 requests where user data was submitted. Of these, 5 requests were executed based on 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.

In addition to this, ShareChat also received over 61,88,644 user complaints during January 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 (28.64%). This was followed closely by online abusive behaviour which formed 27.64% of the total complaints. The next biggest chunk of complaints was related to ‘No category’ (10.66%), sexually explicit content (6.89%) and spam (6.16%).

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. These included:

• It took action against more than 4 Mn pieces of content for violating norms. 
• The platform also took down 2.32 Lakh pieces of user generated content that was sexual in nature. 
• As many as 97,878 comments  and 1,363 chat rooms were deleted in January. In addition to that, 78,034 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 imposed a ‘permanent’ UGC ban on 13,028 user accounts in January . The ‘permanent’ ban is only restricted to a period of 360 days. ‘Edit Profile ban’ was imposed on 13,007 accounts and ‘Comment ban’ was imposed on 13,032 accounts.

Remember, in its December compliance report, ShareChat had received over 56,18,870 user complaints. The same report had revealed that the platform had deleted over 1.3 Lakh comments and 1,162 chat rooms during the same period.

In its latest transparency report, Twitter said that it had received a total of 117 complaints during December 26, 2021- January 25, 2022. Most of the listed grievances pertained to online harassment (38), followed by impersonation (25) and hateful conduct (20).

Meta (formerly Facebook), in its latest compliance report, stated that it took action against more than 12.2 Mn pieces of content, primarily for spam and violent and graphic content, among others. 

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.