Social media platform WhatsApp on Wednesday said that over two-million Indian accounts were banned in October, while 500 grievance reports were received.

According to its monthly compliance report, 2,069,000 Indian accounts were banned on WhatsApp during October 1 and October 31.

“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 in processes, in order to keep our users safe on our platform,” a company spokesperson said.

The report highlighted that it received 500 user reports spanning across account support (146), ban appeal (248), other support (42), product support (53), and safety (11) during October, adding that 18 accounts were "actioned" under the ban appeal category based on the reports received, during this period.

“Accounts Actioned” denotes reports where it took remedial action based on the report. WhatsApp explained. Taking action denotes either banning an account or a previously banned account being restored due to the complaint.

Following the IT Rules 2021, the Facebook-owned platform has published its fifth monthly report. In September also, over 2.2 million Indian accounts were banned while 560 grievance reports were received.

“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,” the spokesperson said.

Earlier, it had stated that more than 95 per cent of bans are due to the unauthorised use of automated or bulk messaging (spam). The global average number of accounts that WhatsApp bans to prevent abuse on its platform is around eight million accounts per month.

Related Topics