On Tuesday, the instant messaging platform WhatsApp announced that it had blocked around 1,858,000 accounts in India in January in compliance with the new IT Rules, 2021.
According to the monthly report, the company said that it also received 495 grievance reports, which appealed to ban 285 accounts, out of which 24 accounts received action in the same month from the country.
The complaints by the users were received through its grievances division and the company’s own method to prevent and detect law violators.
A WhatsApp spokesperson commented on the report by confirming that they had published their eighth monthly report according to the guidelines given in the IT Rules 2021.
The report said that the data sharing of the 1.8 million banned accounts highlights the number of Indian accounts banned by WhatsApp between 1 January 2022 – 31 January 2022.
A majority of the accounts that were banned was based on malicious behavior detected through tools and resources deployed by the company in its app.
The company also stated that the numerous accounts were blocked using the abuse detection approach, which includes action taken further to negative feedback received through the ‘Report’ feature available to app users.
“WhatsApp is an industry leader in preventing abuse, among end-to-end encrypted messaging services,”
the spokesperson said.
They added that they have consistently invested in artificial intelligence and other state of the art technology, data scientists and experts over the years and in processes that would help the company keep their users safe from negative experiences on the platform.
This is not the first time the Meta owned platform has banned over a million accounts in India.
The social networking firm barred 3 million accounts in 46 days from June to July last year, and in November 2021, it banned almost 1.7 million Indian accounts after detecting users who engaged in hurtful behavior.
What to do if your account is banned:
Users have the option to long press a message and then click on the three-dot menu on the top right corner to report the messages and sender.
Sometimes an account may be banned unjustly. WhatsApp has a grievance portal set up for this specific purpose where users can send an email with the issue detailed.
Edited By- Subbuthai Padma
Published By- Satheesh Kumar
