WhatsApp banned over 2.9 million accounts in January ‘to combat abuse’

Social messaging platform WhatsApp on Wednesday announced that they banned more than 2.9 million accounts in the country in January to “combat abuse.”

A spokesperson of the social messaging app stated that, “WhatsApp is an industry leader in preventing abuse, among end-to-end encrypted messaging services.” Furthermore he said that over the years the platform has consistently invested in AI and other state-of-the-art technology, data scientist and experts to keep “our users safe on our platform.”

“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 continued.

As per the spokesperson of the platform, from January 1 to 31, they received a total of 1,461 reports, out of which they have taken actions on 195 cases. Apart from this, there were 51 reports on the account support issue, 1,337 on ban appeal, 45 cases on other support case and 21 on product support.

Meanwhile, 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 company furthermore added, “A team of analysts augments these systems to evaluate edge cases and help improve our effectiveness over time,” before adding, “We have detailed our on-platform capabilities to identify and ban accounts in a white paper.”