WhatsApp claims to have blocked over 2 million accounts in less than a month in order to prevent harmful behaviour.

 The majority (95 percent) of the 2 million suspended accounts were for automated mass texting, according to WhatsApp.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WhatsApp claims that between May 15 and June 15, 2021, it banned 20 lakh accounts in an effort to curb disruptive behaviour. The corporation announced that it had banned 20,11,000 accounts in this one-month period in its first transparency report, which was published under the new Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. The messaging platform, which is owned by Facebook, recognises .The +91 country code of the mobile number used to register is used to create Indian accounts. It further stated that India alone accounts for 25% of all banned accounts worldwide.

On Thursday, WhatsApp released the first edition of its intermediary standards report, in which the firm emphasised its own efforts to avoid harmful behaviour. "Our primary priority is to prevent accounts from delivering damaging or undesired messages at scale," WhatsApp said in a report sent to Gadgets 360 via email. "We retain advanced ability to identify these accounts sending a high or irregular rate of messages, and we banned 2 million accounts attempting this form of abuse in India alone from May 15 to June 15."

"We rely on available unencrypted information, such as user reports, profile images, and group photos and descriptions, in addition to employing advanced AI algorithms and resources to detect and prevent misuse on our platform," WhatsApp noted.

WhatsApp received 70 reports for account assistance, 204 for ban appeals (of which it responded to 63), 20 for other support, 43 for product support, and 8 for "safety issues," according to the company. It went on to say that after the service recognised "automated bulk messaging," or spam, nearly 95% (or 19 lakh) of the account bans were carried out automatically.

According to WhatsApp's study, the global average for account bans is around 8 million per month, which means that bans in India (often for mass messaging or spam) accounted for a quarter of all global bans.

This is unsurprising given that India is WhatsApp's largest market, with about 400 million users out of the 2 billion active users worldwide, or around one out of every five WhatsApp users.

WhatsApp also stated that future versions of the data transparency report would be released 30-45 days after the reporting period had ended, to allow for adequate data collection and validation.