WhatsApp bans over 72L bad accounts in India in July 2023

WhatsApp monthly compliance report in India: Meta-owned messaging and calling platform, WhatsApp today announced that it has banned a record of over 72 lakh bad accounts in India in the month of July, in compliance with the new IT Rules 2021 in India. Between July 1-31, “72,28,000 WhatsApp accounts were banned. 31,08,000 of these accounts were proactively banned, before any reports from users”, WhatsApp said in its monthly compliance report.

The most popular messaging platform, which has over 500 million users in the country, received another record 11,067 complaint reports in July in the country, and the records “actioned” were 72. “Accounts Actioned” denotes reports where WhatsApp took remedial action based on the report and taking action denotes either banning an account or a previously banned account being restored as a result.

“This user-safety report contains details of the user complaints received and the corresponding action taken by WhatsApp, as well as WhatsApp’s own preventive actions to combat abuse on our platform,” according to the company.

Moreover, the company mentioned that the orders received from the Grievance Appellate Committee between July 1 and July 31 were five, and orders complied with were also five.

In a bid to empower millions of Indian social media users, the Centre recently launched the Grievance Appellate Committee (GAC) that will look into their concerns regarding content and other issues. The newly-formed panel, a move to strengthen the country’s digital laws to tame the Big Tech companies, will look into appeals by users against decisions of social media platforms. In a major push towards an open, safe, trusted and accountable Internet, the Ministry of Electronics and IT has notified some amendments aimed at protecting the rights of ‘Digital Nagriks’.

Separately, Meta also announced that it banned a whopping 21 million pieces of bad content from Facebook in India in July 2023. The company also said that it took down 5.9 million pieces of bad content from Instagram in India in July 2023.