WhatsApp Compliance Report: 1.75 million Indian accounts banned in November 2021

In compliance with the IT Rules 2021, WhatsApp said it has banned 1,759,000 accounts in India in November this year. The compliance report also stated that it received 602 grievances in the same month from the country, and took action on 36 of them. Taking action denotes either banning an account or a previously banned account being restored as a result of the complaint.

The Facebook-owned messaging platform, in its latest report stated that more than 95% of bans are due to the unauthorised use of automated or bulk messaging (spam). Over 2 million Indian accounts were banned by WhatsApp, while 500 grievance reports were received by the messaging platform in October.

"In accordance with the IT Rules 2021, we've published our sixth monthly report for the month of November. 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," the company said in a statement.

The company has said it will continue to bring more transparency to its work and include more information about its endeavours in future reports. Earlier, WhatsApp had mentioned that being an end-to-end encrypted platform, it has no visibility into the content of any messages.

The new IT Rules 2021, which came into effect in May need large digital platforms (with over 50 lakh users) to publish compliance reports every month, giving the details of complaints received and action taken.