In July, WhatsApp Banned Nearly 24 Million Indian Accounts, and 14 Million Accounts Were 'Proactively' Disabled: All Details

 

In July, WhatsApp deleted roughly 24 million accounts in India, according to the company's monthly compliance report. The messaging service owned by Meta is an intermediary under the IT Rules and publishes monthly updates on actions taken against platform accounts. According to WhatsApp, 14 million accounts were 'proactively' banned, which implies they were terminated without receiving user reports. Facebook and Instagram said on Wednesday that 2.7 billion postings were removed from their respective platforms in July.

According to WhatsApp's most recent report titled 'India Monthly Report under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021,' approximately 23,87,000 accounts were banned in India in July.

WhatsApp stated that the accounts were banned based on both user reports through the company's grievance redressal mechanism, which is required under the IT Rules, and its own systems identifying accounts breaking its terms of service.

Notably, the elimination of roughly 24 lakh accounts by the corporation is the highest since March, when over 18 lakh accounts were blocked. In April and May, the business deleted 16 million and 19 million accounts, respectively. In June, 22 million accounts were banned.

WhatsApp must also recognise and address customer complaints in accordance with the IT Rules-mandated grievance system. According to the company, it received 574 user reports and acted on 27 of them.

The majority of user reports pertained to account ban appeals, with the firm stating that it took action on 27 of these accounts. In the meantime, the corporation did not respond on 116 reports for account support, 13 reports for safety, and other issues.

As part of its compliance report for July, Meta stated on Wednesday that it has eliminated over 2.7 billion postings from Facebook and Instagram during that month. As part of its attempts to comply with the government's laws for social media platforms, Facebook, which is an intermediary under the IT Rules, removed 1.73 crore spam messages and 23 lakh posts with violent and graphic content.