According to WhatsApp compliance report, over 1.75 million Indian accounts were banned by the company, while 602 grievance reports were received by the messaging platform in November 2021.
The new IT rules, which came into effect in May 2021, require large digital platforms (with over 5 million users) to publish compliance reports every month, mentioning the details of complaints received and action taken.
In accordance with the IT rules 2021, WhatsApp published its sixth monthly report for the month of November 2021. Previously, the company had stated that more than 95 per cent of bans are due to the unauthorised use of automated or bulk messaging (spam). Over 2 million Indian accounts were banned by WhatsApp, while 500 grievance reports were received by the messaging platform in October 2021.
During this period, 36 accounts were “actioned” under the ban appeal category based on the reports received. To this WhatsApp explained that “accounts actioned” denotes reports where it took remedial action. Also, according to the company, taking action denotes either banning an account or a previously banned account being restored as a result of the complaint.
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 artificial intelligence (AI) tools and resources to detect and prevent abuse on its platform.
