WhatsApp removed 2.39 million Indians from its platform in July, the highest figure in 2022, the company said in its monthly report late on Thursday.
The popular instant messaging app's ban on 2.39 million Indians in July 2022 was its second highest figure ever in the country. In the same month last year, WhatsApp banned 3.27 million people from its platform in the South Asian nation.
Of the total number of accounts banned in July 2022, 1.42 million were banned "proactively" without any complaints from users.
However, several accounts were taken off the platform after users filed complaints on the app's grievances channel. Additionally, the company used its tools and resources to detect abusive user behavior, including fake news and inflammatory material, WhatsApp stated in its monthly report.
Overall, 574 grievance reports were received by WhatsApp in the month of July.
India's stricter IT rules were introduced last year, making publishing compliance reports mandatory every month.
While WhatsApp has been quite vocal about its end-to-end encryption, it continues to ban accounts in India without seeing the messages of users.
Earlier this year, the company said that abuses on the platform are notified when it sees a particular pattern, leading to the elimination of bad accounts.
“Our systems can detect if a similar phone number has been recently abused or if the computer network used for registration has been associated with suspicious behavior. As a result, we're able to detect and ban many accounts before they register — preventing them from sending a single message," WhatsApp said in a whitepaper.
Stating that normal users operate relatively slowly on WhatsApp, tapping messages one at a time or occasionally forwarding content, it further said: "The intensity of user activity can provide a signal that accounts are abusing WhatsApp. For example, an account that registered five minutes before attempting to send 100 messages in 15 seconds is almost certain to be engaged in abuse, as is an account that attempts to quickly create dozens of groups or add thousands of users to a series of existing groups."
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