WhatsApp bans over 1.4 mn bad accounts in India in Feb

WhatsApp on Friday said that it banned 1,426,000 bad accounts in India in the month of February in compliance with the new IT Rules, 2021.

The platform had banned 1,858,000 accounts in January.

The company said that it also received 335 grievance reports in the same month from the country and took action on 21 of those in January.

"In accordance with the IT Rules 2021, we've published our ninth monthly report for the month of February 2022," a WhatsApp spokesperson said in a statement.

"As captured in the latest Monthly Report, WhatsApp banned over 1.4 million accounts in the month of February," the spokesperson added.

The company said that data shared highlights the number of Indian accounts banned by WhatsApp between February 1 to February 28 using the abuse detection approach, which also includes action taken in furtherance to negative feedback received from users via its "Report" feature.

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

"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 added.

Under the new IT Rules 2021, big digital and social media platforms -- with more than 5 million users -- have to publish monthly compliance reports.

--IANS

na/vd