Aishwarya Kumar, Pune
The monthly compliance report of the messaging platform WhatsApp, owned by Meta, confirms that it has banned around 74 lakh accounts on grounds of creating a safe messaging environment and adhering to the IT rules set in place by India.
WhatApp had banned a total of 7,420,748 accounts between August 1 and August 30, 2023. Out of this, 35 lakh accounts were proactively banned before receiving any report from any user.
The user safety report enlists the details of complaints received by the messaging platform, the actions taken by the messaging platform against those complaints, and the corresponding prevention rules that are set in place by the platform to combat such instances.
WhatsApp has received 14,767 complaints from India, and it has acknowledged a total of 71 cases. The actions taken would include banning the account or restoring a previously banned account as a result of the complaint.
WhatsApp has hired a team of professionals who are dedicated to ensuring the safety of the platform. The team includes data scientists, engineers, analysts, researchers, and law enforcement specialists who manage and create policies concerning the safety of the platform.
The Government of India has launched a Grievance Appellate Committee (GAC), which allows users to flag and appeal against the decisions of social media platforms by filing complaints through the GAC portal. WhatsApp received one order from the GAC committee from the country in August and has confirmed that it has complied with the order.
WhatsApp is working on redesigning the chat interface on the Android version of its interface. There are some additional changes to WhatsApp planned, which include changing colors in the app, and this change will affect the way the app will appear in dark mode and make improvements to WhatsApp Beta for IOS and Android. This feature will come soon after the platform announced a search feature to help people search quickly for status update channels.