WhatsApp bans 1.75 mn accounts in India in November 2021; receives 602 grievance reports

Meta-owned WhatsApp on Saturday said that it banned 1,759,000 accounts in India in November in compliance with the IT Rules 2021.

WhatsApp also received 602 grievance reports in the same month from the country, and took action on 36 of those.

"In accordance with the IT Rules 2021, we've published our sixth monthly report for the month of November. 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," a WhatsApp spokesperson said in a statement.

"As captured in the latest Monthly Report, WhatsApp banned over 1.75 million accounts in the month of November," the spokesperson added.

In October, the platform had banned over 2 million accounts in India. WhatsApp has more than 400 million users in India.

"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," the company said.

On the other hand, Meta said that over 16.2 million content pieces were "actioned" on Facebook across 13 violation categories proactively in India during November.

Photo sharing platform Instagram took action against over 3.2 million pieces across 12 categories during the same period proactively.

The new IT rules -- which came into effect in May last year -- require large digital platforms (with over 5 million users) to publish compliance reports every month, mentioning the details of complaints received and action taken.

"We will continue to bring more transparency to our work and include more information about our efforts in future reports," said WhatsApp.

(With inputs from IANS)

Published on: Sunday, January 02, 2022, 03:00 PM IST