New Delhi, 16th July 2021: Global instant messaging app WhatsApp, on Thursday released its first monthly compliance report in compliance with the new Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code, also known as the IT Rules, 2021. According to the report, the company has banned a total of 2 million Indian accounts in India during these 30 days from May 15 to June 15, 2021. While it received a total of 345 reports during this period. The platform blocked around 8 million accounts a month across the world.
“Our main focus is to prevent accounts from sending harmful or unwanted messages on a large scale. We are maintaining advanced capabilities to identify these accounts that send messages at high or unusual rates from May 15 to June 15 in India. We have banned 20 lakh accounts that attempt such misuse.” said, Whatsapp in its report.
Any Whatsapp account that is registered with a number starting with +91 is considered an Indian account on the platform. The 2 million Indian accounts which were banned were following its three-step process. More than 95% of accounts that “misused automated or bulk messaging” were banned.
It has been made mandatory to present this report under the new Information Technology Rules. Under the new rules, leading digital platforms with more than 5 million users are required to publish compliance reports every month. In this report, it is necessary to mention the complaints received by them for these platforms and the action to be taken on them.
Apart from WhatsApp, Facebook on Thursday also released a second report detailing the complaints received from users in India through grievance mechanisms during the period from May 15 to June 15, 2021.
Whatsapp has published its first report for India. It is now the fourth company after Google, Facebook, and Twitter to publish the report and appoint officers keeping in mind the new guidelines.
