Jan 2: The messaging app WhatsApp, owned by Meta, said it banned 1,759,000 WhatsApp accounts in India in November in adherence with the IT Rules 2021. In November WhatsApp received 602 complaints from the country and it took action on 36 of them.
“As per IT Rules 2021, we have published our sixth monthly report for the month of November,” a WhatsApp spokesperson said. “This user security report includes details of user complaints and respective actions taken by WhatsApp as well as WhatsApp’s own precautionary measures.”
“As reported in the new monthly report, WhatsApp banned more than 1.75 million accounts in the month of November,” the spokesperson said. In October, it had banned more than 2 million accounts in India. WhatsApp has more than 40 crore users in India.
“Over the years, we have been investing in artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies, data scientists and experts and processes in order to safeguard our users on our platform,” the company said.
Meta, on the other hand, said that during November, Facebook actively took “action” on more than 16.2 million content pieces in 13 violent categories actively in India. During the same period photo-sharing platform Instagram continuously took action against more than 3.2 million content pieces in 12 categories.
The new IT rules – which came into force in May last year – require large digital platforms (with more than 5 million users) to publish compliance reports every month, which contains details of action taken against complaints received. “We will continue to strive for more transparency in our work and include more information about our efforts in future reports,” WhatsApp’s spokesperson said.
