WhatsApp says it banned more than 2 million accounts in one month

WhatsApp says it banned more than 20 lakhs of accounts between May 15 and June 15, 2021, to try to prevent harmful behaviour. In its first transparency report, published under the new Information Technology Rules (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Code of Ethics), 2021, the company revealed that it had banned 20,11,000 accounts in this one-month period. WhatsApp identifies Indian accounts via the country code +91 of the mobile phone number used to register. It also added that India alone accounts for 25 percent of all banned accounts in the world.

WhatsApp published the first edition of its intermediary guidelines report on Thursday, and in it, the company highlighted its own actions to prevent harmful behaviour. "Our main goal is to prevent accounts from sending harmful or unwanted messages on a large scale," WhatsApp said in its report that it also shared via email to Gadgets 360. "We maintain advanced capabilities to identify these accounts that send a high or abnormal rate of messages and banned 2 million accounts in India alone from May 15 to June 15 to attempt this type of abuse."

"In addition to the behavioural signals from accounts, we rely on available unencrypted information including user reports, profile photos, and group photos and descriptions, besides deploying advanced AI tools and resources to detect and prevent abuse on our platform," WhatsApp further added.

According to WhatsApp, it received a total of 70 reports for account support, 204 for ban appeals (of which it took action on 63), 20 for other support, 43 for product support, and 8 for "security issues." It added that nearly 95 percent or 19 lakh of the account bans were carried out automatically after the service detected "automated bulk messaging" or spam.

It added that the number of accounts that were banned has increased significantly since 2019, because "our systems have increased in sophistication, so we are catching more accounts even as we believe there are more attempts to send bulk or automated messages."

In its report, WhatsApp shared that the global average is about 8 million accounts banned per month, meaning that bans in India (most of which were for bulk messages or spam) accounted for a quarter of all bans in the world.

This is not surprising given that India is the largest market for WhatsApp; Some industry estimates suggest that India has nearly 400 million users, out of the 2 billion active users worldwide, or roughly one Indian user in five who has WhatsApp.

WhatsApp added that subsequent editions of the data transparency report will be published 30-45 days after the reporting period, to allow enough time for data collection and validation.