WhatsApp Banned Over 2.9 Million Indian Accounts in January to Combat Abuse

Social messaging platform WhatsApp on Wednesday said it banned over 2.9 million accounts in the country in month of January to "combat abuse."

"WhatsApp is an industry leader in preventing abuse, among end-to-end encrypted messaging services," a spokesperson of the social messaging platform said.

In order to keep "our users safe on our platform," WhatsApp over the years has consistently invested in artificial intelligence and other state-of-the-art technology, data scientists and experts, the spokesperson said.

"In accordance with the IT Rules 2021, we have published our report for the month of January 2023. 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. As captured in the latest monthly report, WhatsApp banned over 2.9 million accounts in January," he added.

From January 1 till January 31, a total of 1,461 reports were received and a total of 195 cases were taken up for actions. There were 51 reports on the issue of account support, 1,337 reports on ban appeal, 45 cases on other support case and 21 cases on product support.

In the company statement, the messaging company said in addition to responding to and actioning on user complaints through the grievance channel, WhatsApp also deploys tools and resources to prevent harmful behaviour on the platform.

The company said, "We are particularly focused on prevention because we believe it is much better to stop harmful activity from happening in the first place than to detect it after harm has occurred."

The abuse detection operates at three stages of an account's lifestyle: at registration, during messaging, and in response to negative feedback, which we receive in the form of user reports and blocks.

"A team of analysts augments these systems to evaluate edge cases and help improve our effectiveness over time," the company said, adding, "We have detailed our on-platform capabilities to identify and ban accounts in a white paper."