WhatsApp banned over 26 lakh Indian accounts in Sept

WhatsApp banned over 26 lakh accounts in India in September. This has been revealed by messaging app in its September User Safety Monthly Report.

The report has been published under Rule 4(1) (d) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. The accounts are actioned in India through prevention and detection methods for violating the laws of India.

The reports published by WhatsApp said that it banned most of the accounts after receiving complaints reports from Indian users via WhatsApp’s grievance mechanisms. As many as 2,685,000 Indian accounts were banned.

Whatsapp in its recent reports also mentioned that users' security and privacy are WhatsApp's priority. The end-to-end encrypted messaging system is made to protect individual privacy. Along with this, Whatsapp has assigned a dedicated team of data engineers, data scientists, other researchers, and experts to safeguard individual rights. 

According to the India monthly report published on November 1, 2021, WhatsApp said “In addition to responding to and actioning on user complaints through the grievance channel, 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. 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. We have detailed our on-platform capabilities to identify and ban accounts in this white paper. The data shared below highlights the number of Indian accounts banned by WhatsApp between 1 Sep 2022 and 30 Sep 2022 using the aforementioned abuse detection approach, which also includes action taken in furtherance to negative feedback received from users via our “Report” feature. We will continue with the transparency to our work and include information about our efforts in future reports,” the company said.