WhatsApp Banned 2.07 Mn Accounts In October: Compliance Report

Meta-owned WhatsApp has banned 2,069,000 accounts from October 1-31, it revealed in its compliance report. The report added that WhatsApp received 500 grievances in October, of which almost half of them were ban appeals.

This included 146 instances of account support, 248 ban appeals, 95 related to product and other support and 11 grievance reports related to safety. WhatsApp banned 18 accounts, actioning via external ban appeals.

Compared to September, the numbers are relatively less. In September, WhatsApp banned 2,209,000 accounts, received 560 grievance reports in India, including 121 instances of account support, 309 ban appeals, 98 support-related and 32 grievance reports related to safety.

Shedding light on how it tackles abuse, the company said, “The abuse detection operates at three stages of an account’s lifestyle — at registration, during messaging, and in response to negative feedback, which we receive 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.”

The fifth report, published under the New IT Rules, added that apart from grievances, it deploys tools and resources as preventive measures with a focus on stopping harmful activity from happening in the first place.

The compliance report has to be filed under the Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code, Rules 2021, that came into effect on May 25, 2021.

Social Media Giants Remove 106.9 Mn Accounts/Posts In Q2 FY22

Top social media platforms including Google, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, Twitter and Koo have been publishing monthly compliance reports since it became mandatory in May 2021. Over the third quarter of the financial year 2021-22 (July to September), the above mentioned social media platforms have combined removed/banned/moderated 106.9 Mn content pieces/user accounts.

While the majority of the posts or accounts have been self-moderated by the platform through their in-house AI-ML moderators, a small number was also taken into account as reported by users.

Across the platforms, key categories for user-reported and self-moderated posts were sexual and violent graphic content, spam, hate speech, terrorism and suicidal content, depending on the type of the social media platform.

From July-September 2021, Google moderated over 266K pieces of content.

Meta-owned WhatsApp, on the other hand, banned 6.3 Mn accounts in the said time period, Instagram banned and actioned 8.2 Mn accounts and posts, while Facebook’s total number for July-September was a little under 92 Mn.

Twitter’s account ban numbers stood around 50K, while its homegrown alternative moderated and actioned 139K & 125.4K posts, respectively.