Messaging App Whatsapp spokesperson says it banned over 16 lakh Indian users' accounts in the month of April as part of its preventive actions to combat abuse on the platform.
These accounts were banned by WhatsApp between April 1 and 30 using its abuse detection approach including action taken as per the negative feedback received from the users via the Report feature.
“Safety-related grievances pertain to issues that may be about abuse or harmful behaviour on the platform. For such grievances, we respond to the user guiding them to report the complaint via in-app reporting. This allows WhatsApp to receive the most recent messages sent to the complainant by the reported user or group, as well as information on the complainant’s recent interactions with the reported user. As per our processes, this is not recorded as an action taken against the grievance report,” the company said in its report.
"Our goal is to identify and stop abusive accounts as quickly as possible, which is why identifying these accounts manually is not realistic. Instead, we have advanced machine learning systems that take action to ban accounts, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week," the report said.