WhatsApp banned over 20 lakh accounts in December 2021: Compliance Report

The new banned accounts figure is a massive bump from 17 lakh Indian accounts that were banned in November 2021 by WhatsApp.

WhatsApp has published its latest compliance report in accordance with the new Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules, 2021 (IT Rules, 2021). (Express Photo)

WhatsApp, in its latest compliance report for December confirmed that it banned over 20 lakh Indian accounts. The new banned accounts figure is a massive bump from 17 lakh Indian accounts that were banned in November 2021 by the cross messaging platform. The report is published in accordance with Rule 4(1)(d) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.

Meanwhile, 528 grievance reports were received by WhatsApp in December 2021, spanning across account support (149), ban appeal (303), other support (29), product support (34) and safety (13). “The data shared below highlights the number of Indian accounts banned by WhatsApp between December 1, 2021-December 31, 2021 using the abuse detection approach, which also includes action taken in furtherance to negative feedback received from users via our “Report” feature. We will continue to bring more transparency to our work and include more information about our efforts in future reports,” the company said in its latest report.

In addition to responding to and taking action on user complaints through the grievance channel, WhatsApp said it has also deployed 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,” the company added.

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“Over the years, we have consistently invested in Artificial Intelligence and other state of the art technology, data scientists and experts, and in processes, in order to keep our users safe on our platform. In accordance with the IT Rules 2021, we’ve published our seventh monthly report for the month of December. This user-safety report contains details of the user complaints received and the corresponding action taken by WhatsApp, as well as WhatsApp’s own preventive actions to combat abuse on our platform,” said a WhatsApp spokesperson,

Earlier, in November over 17.5 lakh Indian accounts were banned by WhatsApp, and 602 grievance reports were received by the messaging platform, according to its compliance report.