Guwahati: The Meta-owned social messaging service WhatsApp banned more than 2.9 million accounts in India in the month of January 2023.
A monthly report states that a total of 2,918,000 WhatsApp accounts were blocked between January 1 and January 31. 1,038,000 of these accounts were proactively banned before any user complaints were received.
The messaging service reportedly disabled the accounts to “prevent misuse.”
“WhatsApp is an industry leader in preventing abuse, among end-to-end encrypted messaging services,” a spokesperson of the social messaging platform said.
In order to keep “our users safe on our platform,” WhatsApp over the years has consistently invested in artificial intelligence and other state-of-the-art technology, data scientists and experts, the spokesperson further said.
“In accordance with the IT Rules 2021, we have published our report for the month of January 2023. 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. As captured in the latest monthly report, WhatsApp banned over 2.9 million accounts in January,” he added.
The most widely used messaging service, which has close to 500 million users nationwide, got 1,461 complaint complaints in January, with 195 of those records being “acted upon.”
The company 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 abuse detection operates at three stages of an account’s lifestyle: at registration, during messaging, and in response to negative feedback, which we receive in the form of user reports and blocks.