16 lakhs Indian accounts banned by WhatsApp in April

In its monthly report for the month of April 2022 that was released on Wednesday, WhatsApp has published that it has banned 1,666,000 accounts from India in April.

The report is published in accordance with Rule 4(1)(d) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.

“In accordance with the IT Rules 2021, we’ve published our report for the month of April 2022. 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 1.6 million accounts in the month of April,” WhatsApp spokesperson said in a statement.

Earlier, in March the platform had banned over 18 lakh WhatsApp accounts in the country. For the month of April, a total of 844 grievance reports were received from India, and the Meta-owned messaging platform took action on 123 of the reports. Out of the 844 grievance reports, 670 reports were for ban appeal, and the rest were under other categories like support and safety.

Comparing these numbers to the previous month, WhatsApp received 597 grievance reports in March, and 74 were actioned.

“WhatsApp is an industry leader in preventing abuse, among end-to-end encrypted messaging services. 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 spokesperson said.

The platform said that abuse detection operates at three stages of an account’s lifestyle - at registration, during messaging, and in response to negative feedback, which WhatsApp receives in the form of user reports and blocks. A team of analysts augments these systems to evaluate edge cases and help improve the platform's effectiveness over time.