WhatsApp Banned 2.6 Mn Indian Accounts In September

Instant messaging app WhatsApp banned more than 2.6 Mn accounts in September 2022, the latest compliance report published by the Meta-owned platform revealed.

A majority of the accounts, around 1.8 Mn, were banned in response to complaints from users, while the remaining 8.72 Lakh were proactively banned by the social media platform for flouting community guidelines.

“…WhatsApp also deploys tools and resources to prevent harmful behavior 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,” said WhatsApp.

The social media platform also received 666 complaints from its Indian users during the month through its local grievance redressal mechanisms. A major chunk of these complaints, 496, related to ban appeals. This was followed closely by requests regarding account support (100), other support (32), product support (30) and safety (8).

The social media platform actioned 19 accounts in response to the complaints. WhatsApp took remedial actions that included either banning the account or restoring a previously banned account.

WhatsApp’s abuse detection process operates at three levels – registration, during messaging, and in response to negative feedback. Besides, a team of analysts also works to augment the system and increase the efficacy of the detection tools. 

In its previous compliance report for the month of August, WhatsApp said it had banned more than 2.3 Mn accounts for violating various guidelines. 

WhatsApp’s sister platforms, Facebook and Instagram, together took action against 33.78 Mn content pieces in September. 

This comes as WhatsApp continued to be mired in controversy in October. The platform suffered a massive outage last month, which disrupted services for close to two hours. Such was the effect that even the union government sought a report from the platform on the outage. 

While Meta submitted a report to the government in the matter, it publicly cited a ‘technical glitch’ as the reason behind the outage. Prior to that, the Supreme Court also, more or less, greenlighted the Competition Commission of India’s (CCI’s) probe into its contentious 2021 privacy policy update. 

Its parent company also suffered a major rout as below-par financial performance weighed heavily on the stocks. At one point last week, Meta’s market valuation plunged by more than $80 Bn.

In its latest compliance report for the period between August 26, 2022 and September 25, 2022, Twitter said it banned 54,123 accounts for promoting content related to child sexual exploitation, non-consensual nudity promoting terrorism, and other similar content. 

Meanwhile, the homegrown social media platform Sharechat received 4.68 Mn user grievances in September 2022. 

All social media platforms with more than 5 Mn users are mandated under the IT Rules, 2021 to publish monthly compliance reports.