As per WhatsApp India’s ‘User Safety Monthly Report’ under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2022, WhatsApp messenger banned 2.9 million Indian accounts in January 2023. The accounts were banned on the basis of complaints received from users through its grievances division and the company’s own mechanism to prevent and detect law violators.
The number of accounts blocked in January 2023 were much lower as compared to 3.6 million accounts that the messaging platform banned in December 2022. Of the 2.9 million banned accounts, 1.03 million were proactively banned, before any reports from users. The messaging platform, which has nearly 500 million users in India, revealed that it received around 1,461 grievance reports in January 2023 and actioned 195 of those complaints.
