Hyderabad, 18 April 2019: Earlier last month, ShareChat along with other social media platforms signed and adopted a ‘Voluntary Code of Ethics’ to support the Election Commission of India (ECI) to ensure a free and fair election process. As part of this, ShareChat conducted a training session for ECI appointed nodal officers in New Delhi. The training included methods through which the ECI could report potentially unlawful content for expeditious redressal.
Beyond the company’s commitments made to the ECI, over the past three months in the run up to the Lok Sabha elections in India, the efforts in policing the platform has intensified This has been done to ensure that the platform is not misused in any way to aide in activities that could be considered voter suppression or misinformation campaigns.
As part of these efforts, since February 2019, ShareChat has removed user accounts as well as a large number of individual pieces of content for violating the Community Guidelines as well as the terms of use.
- As part of the policing efforts on the platform, over 487,000 unique pieces of content have been removed. These contents were taken down for violating the community guidelines as well as in some cases the terms of use
- Of the above, 13,195 unique pieces of content were from politics and news section which were violative of the community guidelines
- Of the above 6431 pieces of content were taken down which were sharing content marked as factually inaccurate by a third-party fact checking agency, NewsChecker.in
- 54,404 accounts have also been removed. This has been the largest removal of accounts yet. This removal specifically targeted accounts that were indulging in the sharing of harmful or abusive content, engaging in disruptive behaviour and for using the platform in a way that was violative of the terms of use
Some of these posts included factually inaccurate statements with regard to the national elections, shared content with an intent to cause public disorder that was meant to create a frenzy amongst various political party supporters and or the general public.
Berges Y Malu, Head of Policy, ShareChat said, “We work constantly to be the social media platform of choice for millions of Indians who would like to share and view content in their preferred language. And therefore, we are focused towards ensuring that our platform is not misused by bad actors. We have invested resources to ensure our AI tools as well human reviewers are well trained in order to effectively detect and stall harmful behaviour on our platform.”