WhatsApp says it banned over 1.6 million accounts in April

These accounts were banned by WhatsApp between April 1 and 30 using its abuse detection approach including action taken as per the negative feedback received from the users via the Report feature.

Published on: Jun 1, 2022, 23:24:49 IST

By HT News Desk

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Messaging application Whatsapp on Wednesday said it had banned over 16 lakh accounts in the month of April as part of its preventive actions to combat abuse on the platform, the company spokesperson said in a statement.

In its monthly report under the Information Technology ((Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, WhatsApp said that it took action on 123 accounts on complaints seeking ban on them.

These accounts were banned by WhatsApp between April 1 and 30 using its abuse detection approach including action taken as per the negative feedback received from the users via the Report feature.

“Safety related grievances pertain to issues that may be about abuse or harmful behaviour on the platform. For such grievances, we respond to the user guiding them to report the complaint via in-app reporting. This allows WhatsApp to receive the most recent messages sent to the complainant by the reported user or group, as well as information on the complainant’s recent interactions with the reported user. As per our processes, this is not recorded as an action taken against the grievance report,” the company said in its report.

"Our goal is to identify and stop abusive accounts as quickly as possible, which is why identifying these accounts manually is not realistic. Instead, we have advanced machine learning systems that take action to ban accounts, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week," the report said.

We are particularly focused on prevention because we believe it is much better to stop harmful activity from happening in the first place than to detect it after harm has occurred, the report said.

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