Whatsapp banned over 2.2 million Indian accounts in September

WhatsApp messenger banned over 2.2 million Indian accounts in September (an Indian account being identified as one which begins with a “+91” international calling code), according to the company’s compliance report. Separately, 560 grievance reports were registered by the platform.  

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According to the report released on Monday, it was revealed that 2,209,000 Indian accounts were banned from WhatsApp.

The breakdown of the 560 grievance reports is as follows – 121 were instances of account support, 309 were ban appeals, 32 were related to safety and the rest were related to product and other support.

According to the reports, 51 accounts were ‘actioned’ in the month of September. ‘Actioned’ accounts are the ones on the basis of which remedial action has been taken by the company.

This was Whatsapp’s fourth monthly report, released in accordance with the new IT Rules (2021). The 30-day report consisted of details for the  period September 1 to September 30.

Digital platforms with over 5 million users are required to formulate monthly reports. These reports must include details of complaints received by the platform and the action taken to deal with them.

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Government data from early 2021 revealed that there are over 530 million Whatsapp users in the country, with the number growing each day.

This is not the first time that a large number of accounts have been banned by Whatsapp. The number was over 2 million Indian accounts in August too. The global average of accounts banned by Whatsapp stands at 8 million accounts per month with India contributing largely to this number.

Previously, the company had revealed that over 95% of the accounts were banned due to spam messaging – unauthorised usage of automated messaging.

In the month of August, around 2 million Indian accounts were banned and 420 grievance reports were registered.

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Whatsapp messages are end-to-end encrypted, which means that the platform has no access to the content shared between two users be it in any form, including text, audio files, images and videos.

The platform relies on user reports, profile photos and other unencrypted information to ensure that Whatsapp remains a safe space, free of abusers.