WhatsApp Banned 6.5 Mn Indian Accounts In May 2023

Meta-owned WhatsApp banned more than 6.5 Mn Indian accounts between May 1 and May 31, 2023, the messaging app said in its monthly compliance report.

Of the 6,508,000 WhatsApp accounts, 2,420,700 were banned proactively, before any reports from users. The messaging app banned the accounts via its abuse detection tools which it deploys regularly to ban suspicious accounts. 

“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,” said WhatsApp. “A team of analysts augments these systems to evaluate edge cases and help improve our effectiveness over time.”

This comes off the back of the messaging giant banning nearly 7.5 Mn Indian accounts between April 1 and April 30, 2023. 

Since January 1, WhatsApp has banned 26,191,806 Indian accounts.

Apart from these accounts, the messaging platform also banned 280 other accounts in May after ban appeals from the users. However, Indian users had registered such appeals for 3,474 accounts. As such, WhatsApp only banned around 8% of the accounts against which ban appeals were registered by users.

WhatsApp publishes its report in accordance with Rule 4(1)(d) and Rule 3A(7) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, which mandates platforms with more than 5 Mn users to publish reports.

Other social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter publish similar monthly reports in India.

Last week, Twitter published its monthly compliance report, stating it banned more than 1.13 Mn Indian accounts between April 26 and May 25, 2023, for violating its guidelines.

Earlier this year, WhatsApp was wracked with widespread fraud involving international numbers to defraud users across India. 

Users complained a major chunk of these spam calls had country codes belonging to Indonesia (+62), Vietnam (+84), Malaysia (+60), Kenya (+254) and Ethiopia (+251), offering work-from-home jobs and menial tasks, defrauding users after gaining their trust and getting them to transfer large sums of money in bogus accounts.

The messaging giant, which boasts 2.7 Bn users around the world and 500 Mn in India, has deployed several measures to tackle the issue.

In June, the Meta-owned platform introduced the option to automatically silence incoming calls from unknown callers to safeguard users. Further, WhatsApp has also introduced a ‘Privacy Checkup’ to ensure everyone knows about the options of protection on the platform.