WhatsApp bans over 19 lakh Indian accounts in May

Meta-owned What­sApp sus­pend­ed over 19,000 Indi­an accounts in May based on com­plaints received from users through its com­plaints chan­nel and through its own vio­la­tion pre­ven­tion and detec­tion mech­a­nism, accord­ing to the lat­est month­ly report pub­lished by the mes­sag­ing plat­form was published.

The new IT rules that came into force last year oblige large dig­i­tal plat­forms (with over 50,000 users) to pub­lish com­pli­ance reports every month detail­ing the com­plaints received and the actions taken.

“As per the lat­est month­ly report, What­sApp sus­pend­ed over 1.9 mil­lion accounts in May,” a What­sApp spokesman said.

The user secu­ri­ty report details the user com­plaints received and What­sAp­p’s response to it, as well as its own pre­ven­ta­tive mea­sures to com­bat abuse on the plat­form, the spokesper­son added.

An Indi­an account is iden­ti­fied by the phone num­ber pre­fix +91.

Accord­ing to the report pub­lished on Fri­day, between May 1 and May 31, 2022, 19.10.000 Indi­an accounts were sus­pend­ed from What­sApp using the “abuse detec­tion approach, which also includes mea­sures to encour­age neg­a­tive feed­back from users…” .

In com­par­i­son, the mes­sag­ing plat­form had over 16,000 accounts of Indi­an users sus­pend­ed in April and 18.05.000 such accounts in March.

“Over the years, we have con­sis­tent­ly invest­ed in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and oth­er cut­ting-edge tech­nolo­gies, data sci­en­tists and experts, and process­es to pro­tect our users on our plat­form,” the spokesper­son continued.

As of May 2022, up to 528 com­plaint reports were received and “action” was tak­en against 24 accounts. Of the total reports received, 303 were for “Appeal­ing Bans,” while oth­ers were in the Account Sup­port, Prod­uct Sup­port, and Secu­ri­ty cat­e­gories, among others.

“We respond to all com­plaints received, except in cas­es where a com­plaint is deemed to be a dupli­cate of a pre­vi­ous tick­et. An account will be “processed” when an account is sus­pend­ed or a pre­vi­ous­ly sus­pend­ed account is rein­stat­ed as a result of a com­plaint. “, says the report.

The gov­ern­ment is in the process of final­iz­ing new social media rules that pro­pose to pro­vide users with a griev­ance mech­a­nism against arbi­trary con­tent mod­er­a­tion, inac­tion or take­down deci­sions by big tech companies.

The IT min­istry last month cir­cu­lat­ed draft rules propos­ing a gov­ern­ment pan­el to hear user com­plaints against inac­tion on sub­mit­ted com­plaints or against con­tent-relat­ed deci­sions by social media plat­form com­plaints officers.

Cur­rent­ly, “there is no appeal mech­a­nism through inter­me­di­aries, nor any cred­i­ble self-reg­u­la­to­ry mech­a­nism,” the min­istry said.

Major social media com­pa­nies have in the past drawn crit­i­cism for hate speech, mis­in­for­ma­tion and fake news cir­cu­lat­ing on their plat­forms. Con­cerns have also been raised that dig­i­tal plat­forms are indis­crim­i­nate­ly pulling down con­tent and de-plat­form­ing users. The gov­ern­ment announced IT rules last year to make dig­i­tal inter­me­di­aries more account­able and respon­si­ble for con­tent host­ed on their platforms.