WhatsApp banned over 20 lakh Indian accounts in Dec 2021: Compliance report
PremiumIn November, WhatsApp banned over 17 lakh Indian accounts, while 602 grievance reports were received by the messaging platform
A total of 20,79,000 Indian accounts were banned by WhatsApp, while it received 528 grievance reports in December 2021, reported news agency PTI, quoting the messaging platform's compliance report.
It said that an Indian account is identified via a 91 phone number.
The Meta-owned company had earlier stated that more than 95% of bans were due to the unauthorised use of automated or bulk messaging (spam).
The total 528 user reports span across account support (149), ban appeal (303), other support (29), product support (34) and safety (13).
In November, WhatsApp banned over 17 lakh Indian accounts, while 602 grievance reports were received by the messaging platform.
During this period, 24 accounts were cumulatively "actioned" under the ban appeal category (23) and other support (1) based on the reports received.
WhatsApp explained that "Accounts Actioned" denotes reports where it took remedial action based on the report.
Taking action denotes either banning an account or a previously banned account being restored as a result of the complaint.
Also, reports may have been reviewed but not included as 'Actioned' for many reasons, including the user needing assistance to access their account or to use some features, user-requested restoration of a banned account and the request is denied, or if the reported account does not violate the laws of India or WhatsApp's Terms of Service.
The new IT rules - which came into effect in May last year - require large digital platforms (with over 5 million users) to publish compliance reports every month, mentioning the details of complaints received and action taken.
Previously, WhatsApp had emphasised that being an end-to-end encrypted platform, it has no visibility into the content of any messages.
Besides the behavioural signals from accounts, it relies on available unencrypted information, including user reports, profile photos, group photos and descriptions as well as advanced AI tools and resources to detect and prevent abuse on its platform, it had said.
With inputs from agencies.
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