More than 10 lakh Indian WhatsApp accounts were banned in February

WhatsApp has released its ninth monthly report for the month of February 2022, which states that between February 1 and 28, more than 10 lakh accounts (1.4 million to be specific) were banned.

WhatsApp bans lakhs of accounts in India every month and the same picture stays in February too. In accordance with the IT Rules 2021, the Meta-owned instant messaging platform has released its ninth monthly report for the month of February 2022, which states that between February 1 and 28, more than 10 lakh WhatsApp accounts (1.4 million to be specific) were banned. These accounts were possibly banned for being involved in harmful activities on the platform, such as harassing other users, forwarding fake news, and more.

"Over the years, we have consistently invested in Artificial Intelligence and other state-of-the-art technology, data scientists and experts, and in processes, in order to keep our users safe on our platform. In accordance with the IT Rules 2021, we’ve published our ninth monthly report for the month of February 2022. 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 1.4 million accounts in the month of February,” a WhatsApp spokesperson said in an official statement.

Time and again, the company has reiterated that all messages on the platform are end-to-end encrypted, which means, no one other than the sender and receiver of the message can read the message. Not even WhatsApp or even the parent company, Meta (previously Facebook).

The monthly report further highlights the measures the messaging app takes to prevent harmful behavior on the platform. “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 noted.

WhatsApp has also built an abuse detection technology that operates at three stages of an account’s lifestyle -- at registration, during messaging, and in response to negative feedback, which is sent in the form of user reports and blocks. “A team of analysts augments these systems to evaluate edge cases and help improve our effectiveness over time,” WhatsApp said.

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