The latest compliance report from WhatsApp states that 2,069,000 Indian accounts were banned in October.
Contents
What The Report Contains
In compliance with IT Rules 2021, WhatsApp has published the fifth monthly report for the month of October.
In these reports, it lays out the steps it has taken to address the grievances it received through the grievance mechanism.
An Indian account is identified via a ‘+91’ phone number.
Grievance Categories
Over 95% of bans are due to the unauthorised use of automated or bulk messaging (spam).
Additionally, the company received 500 grievance reports during October.
These included Account Support, Ban Appeals, Reports regarding Other Support, product support, and reports regarding safety.
Grievances related to:
- Account Support: 146
- Ban Appeal: 248
- Other Support: 42
- Product Support: 53
- Safety: 11
Taking Action
Of these, only 18 requests were actioned, all of which belonged to the ban appeal category.
It takes action on unethical or illegal activities on the platform, details of which it publishes in the reports.
An account is ‘actioned’ when it is banned or is restored after a previous ban as a result of a complaint.
It clarified that it responds to all grievances except for duplicates of a previous ticket.
How It Detects Abuse
Actions it takes on accounts accused of abuse are dependent on available unencrypted information such as user reports, profile photos, group photos and descriptions.
In order to boost its efforts towards preventing abuse, it has “consistently invested in Artificial Intelligence and other state of the art technology, data scientists and experts”.
How You Can Send Your Complaints
Users can send their grievances via email to grievance_officer_wa@support.whatsapp.com
Alternatively, one can send a letter to the India Grievance Officer via post.
Abuse Detection System
WhatsApp can review these grievances and then deploy its own tools and resources to stop abuse and other harmful activity.
The tools and resources are deployed in 3 stages-registration, during messaging, and in response to negative feedback.
Most of the 2.069 million accounts banned in October were a result of this abuse detection process