WhatsApp has banned 37,16,000 Indian users’ accounts last month for violating the country’s law or the platform’s terms of service. Out of these, 90,000 accounts were proactively banned before any reports from users, the platform stated in a report.
In its monthly compliance report under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 published on Thursday, it revealed that it received 946 reports, which included ban appeals, account support, product support and others. It said the action was taken on 74 accounts.
“WhatsApp is an industry leader in preventing abuse, among end-to-end encrypted messaging services. Over the years, we have consistently invested in Artificial Intelligence and other state-of-the-art technology, data scientists and experts, and processes, in order to keep our users safe on our platform,” a spokesperson for the company stated.
The compliance report publishes data on the platform’s action between November 1 and November 30. An Indian account is identified with +91 phone number.
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The Meta-owned instant messaging platform said the report captures grievances from users in India received via two methods:
1. E-mails sent to grievance_officer_wa@support.whatsapp.com regarding violations of WhatsApp’s Terms of Service, or questions about accounts on WhatsApp, published in the Help Center.
2. Mails sent to the India Grievance Officer via post.
“In addition to responding to and actioning on user complaints through the grievance channel, WhatsApp also deploys tools and resources to prevent harmful behaviour 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,” WhatsApp added.