WhatsApp banned more than 20 lakh accounts in 1 month, know why the decision was taken

WhatsApp says it banned 20 lakh accounts between May 15 and June 15, 2021, to prevent harmful activities. In its first transparency report published under the new 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. The Facebook-owned messaging platform identifies Indian accounts through the +91 country code of the mobile number used for registration. It also said that 25 percent of all banned accounts in the world are in India alone.

WhatsApp published the first edition of its Intermediary Guidelines report on Thursday, highlighting the company’s own actions to prevent harmful activities. “Our primary focus is to prevent accounts from sending harmful or unwanted messages at scale,” WhatsApp said in its report. He shared this report with Gadgets 360 over email. “We maintain advanced capabilities to identify these accounts sending messages at a high or unusual rate and we banned 2 million accounts in India alone from May 15 to June 15 in an effort to prevent such abuse.” Have put.”

WhatsApp said, “In addition to behavioral signals from accounts, we implement advanced AI tools and resources to detect and prevent abuse on our platform, including user reports, profile photos, and group photos and descriptions.” Rely on information without encryption.” According to WhatsApp, it received a total of 70 reports for account support, 204 for ban appeals (63 of which were actioned), 20 for other support, 43 for product support, and 8 for “security issues”. It said about 95 percent (or 19 lakh) of the account bans were done automatically when the service detected “automated bulk messaging” or spam.

It said the number of accounts banned has increased significantly since 2019 because “our systems have increased in sophistication, so we are catching more accounts. We also believe that bulk or automated messages More efforts were made to send.” In its report, WhatsApp shared that we have a global average of banning approximately 8 million accounts per month. This included banning accounts in India (most of which were for bulk messaging or spam), accounting for a quarter of all bans in the world.

It is not surprising that India is the biggest market for WhatsApp. of some industries Estimate Let us tell you that out of 2 billion active users worldwide, about 400 million are users from India, or about one out of every five WhatsApp users from India. WhatsApp said that subsequent editions of the Data Transparency Report will be published after 30-45 days to allow adequate time for data collection and verification.