WhatsApp Banned More Than 2 Million Accounts In India in a month, WhatsApp has confirmed that as many 2 million user accounts in India were banned on the instant messaging platform between 15th May and 15th June. This comes as part of the India’s Monthly Report under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.
The company revealed that it had banned 20,11,000 accounts in this one-month period. WhatsApp identifies Indian accounts via the country code +91 of the mobile phone number used to register. It also added that India alone accounts for 25 percent of all banned accounts in the world.
The company identifies an Indian account via +91 phone number.
Stating that more than 95% of such bans are due to the unauthorized use of automated or bulk messaging, the company added that these numbers have increased significantly since 2019 because its systems have increased in sophistication, and hence are detecting more accounts even as it believes there are more attempts to send bulk or automated messages.
“In addition to the behavioural signals from accounts, we rely on available unencrypted information including user reports, profile photos, and group photos and descriptions, besides deploying advanced AI tools and resources to detect and prevent abuse on our platform,” WhatsApp further added.
WhatsApp talks in detail, in the report, about the mechanisms in place to tackle abuse on the platform. These are in addition to the complaints received using the redressal mechanisms. The Facebook-owned social media platform says that the abuse detection method works in three stages—during registration, while messaging and in response to negative feedback from user reports and users blocking an account.
According to WhatsApp, it received a total of 70 reports for account support, 204 for ban appeals (of which it took action on 63), 20 for other support, 43 for product support, and 8 for “security issues.” It added that nearly 95 percent or 19 lakh of the account bans were carried out automatically after the service detected “automated bulk messaging” or spam.