As part of its compliance with the new IT Rules, 2021, WhatsApp on Tuesday announced that it has blocked 2,079,000 accounts in India in the month of December.
In the same month, the company received 528 grievance reports from the country and responded to 24 of them.
“In accordance with the IT Rules 2021, we have published our seventh monthly report for the month of December,” a WhatsApp spokesperson said in a statement.
“As captured in the latest monthly report, WhatsApp banned over 2 million accounts in the month of December,” the spokesperson added.
WhatsApp said the data shared shows the number of Indian accounts banned between December 1 and December 31 based on the abuse detection approach mentioned above, including action taken based on negative feedback received via the “Report” feature.
“WhatsApp is an industry leader in preventing abuse, among end-to-end encrypted messaging services,” the spokesperson said.
“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,” it added.
On Monday, Meta announced it had taken down over 19.3 million pieces of bad content across 13 categories on Facebook and over 2.4 million across 12 categories on Instagram in compliance with the IT Rules 2021.
Between December 1 and December 31, Meta received 534 reports on Facebook through the Indian grievance system. Meta responded to every one of these reports, which ranged from fake profiles and harassment to hacked accounts.
Meta took action on 28 of the 95 other reports where the specialised review was required on Facebook.