Taxing gatekeepers~I
By 2016-17, Facebook had designed a business model that aimed at maximising the ‘user engagement’, that is how much time users spent on their platform, and started collecting data on what they liked and shared.
Meta-owned WhatsApp on Wednesday said it banned over 36 lakh ‘bad’ accounts in India in the month of December 2022 in compliance with the new IT Rules 2021, which are being amended to put more responsibilities on social media platforms.
Between December 1 and December 31, 3,677,000 WhatsApp accounts were banned, and 1,389,000 of these accounts were proactively banned before any reports from users, said the company.
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The messaging platform, which has more than 400 million users in the country, received 1,607 complaint reports in December in the country, and the records ‘actioned’ were 166.
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“In accordance with the IT Rules 2021, we’ve published our report for the month of December 2022. As captured in the latest Monthly Report, WhatsApp banned over 3.6 million accounts in the month of December,” according to a WhatsApp spokesperson.
Under the upgraded IT Rules 2021, major digital and social media platforms, with in excess of 5 million users, have to publish monthly compliance reports.
Meanwhile, in a major push towards an open, safe, trusted and accountable Internet, the Ministry of Electronics and IT has notified some amendments aimed at protecting the rights of ‘Digital Nagriks’.
The amendments impose a legal obligation on intermediaries to take reasonable efforts to prevent users from uploading such content.
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