According to Live Mint, Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp banned nearly two million Indian accounts in less than a month, between May 15 and June 15, for violating the platform’s services.
WhatsApp received 345 complaints from India during this time. While 70 of the cases involved account support, 204 involved appeals for barred accounts, and 20 involved other support difficulties.
In this one-month period, 43 cases of product assistance, such as WhatsApp payments, and eight safety issues were also raised.
Out of these, only requests from 63 accounts were “actioned” by WhatsApp during May 15-June 15, 2021, the compliance report read.
The company clarified that over 95 percent of such bans are due to unauthorised use of automated or bulk messaging (spam).
The company has challenged the traceability clause of the social media and intermediary guidelines, which also mandate it to publish a monthly grievance compliance report. This is the first such report WhatsApp has published for India. WhatsApp is now the fourth company after Google, Facebook and Twitter to publish the report and appoint officers in keeping with the new guidelines.
Facebook and Instagram
Facebook, which published a compliance report last week, said in a more detailed report published Thursday that it received 646 grievances from India between May 15 and June 15 through the newly created grievance channel, with the highest number of complaints being about accounts being hacked.
Instagram, also owned by Facebook, said it received 36 complaints, of which 25 were regarding nudity. “Of these incoming reports, we provided tools for users to resolve the issues in 10 cases. These include pre-established channels to report content for specific violations, self-remediation flows where they can download their data, avenues to address account hacked issues etc,” the report stated. Instagram took action against two million links across nine categories in the period between May 15 and June 15.
