WhatsApp bans record seven million Bad Accounts in India

Monitoring Desk

NEW YORK: Meta-owned WhatsApp banned a record of nearly seven million bad accounts in India in December 2023, in compliance with the new IT Rules 2021, Indian media reported on Saturday.

Between December 1-31, the company banned “6,934,000 accounts”. About 1,658,000 of these accounts were proactively banned, before any reports from users, WhatsApp said in its monthly compliance report.

The most popular messaging platform, which has over 500 million users in India, received another record 16,366 complaint reports in December in the country, and the records “actioned” were 13.”

”Accounts Actioned” denotes reports where WhatsApp took remedial action based on the report and taking action denotes either banning an account or a previously banned account being restored as a result.” 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,” said the company.

In a bid to empower millions of Indian social media users, the Indian government recently launched the Grievance Appellate Committee (GAC) which looks into their concerns regarding content and other issues.

The newly-formed panel, a move to strengthen the country’s digital laws to tame the Big Tech companies, will look into appeals by users against decisions of social media platforms.

“We are an industry leader among end-to-end encrypted messaging services in preventing and combating abuse. In addition to our safety features and controls, we employ a team of engineers, data scientists, analysts, researchers, and experts in law enforcement, online safety, and technology developments to oversee these efforts,” said WhatsApp.

In the month of November, WhatsApp banned more than 7.1 million bad accounts in the country.

In other news about WhatsApp, it is working on several features for its users. Some of these are privacy and security-related like the Chat Lock feature. WhatsApp is reportedly working on a new feature for the web client. The feature was spotted in the ‘under development’ stage and should be released for the stable app soon.

The web client’s Chat Lock feature will work the same way it does on the mobile app. It lets users lock individual chats with a passcode or Face ID.