WhatsApp bans over 17 lakh Indian accounts: What to do if yours gets banned too

WhatsApp published its monthly report about the number of accounts banned in the month of November. The Meta-owned instant messaging application has announced that over 17 lakh accounts were banned from the platform in the period of November 1 to November 30, 2021. In the month of October, WhatsApp had banned over 20 lakh accounts.

The new WhatsApp report has been published in accordance with Rule 4(1)(d) of the Information Technology Rules, 2021. It contains information on actions taken by WhatsApp in response to grievances received from users in India as well as accounts actioned in India through their prevention and detection methods for violating the laws of India or WhatsApp’s Terms of Service.

In view of the reports and the application’s self-found violations, 17,59,000 accounts were banned from the platform.

From the grievance redressal tool offered by the messaging application, there were a total of 602 complaints. Out of these, WhatsApp took action against 36 accounts. There were around 357 appeals for bans out of which 36 were actioned.

WhatsApp considered all grievances received, except in cases where a grievance is deemed to be a duplicate of a previous ticket. An account is ‘actioned’ when an account is banned or a previously banned account is restored, as a result of a complaint.

How are these grievances reported

There are two ways how WhatsApp registers grievances:

-One is via e-mails sent to grievance_officer_wa@support.whatsapp.com regarding violations of WhatsApp’s Terms of Service, or questions about accounts on WhatsApp, published in the Help Center.

-Secondly, the mails that are sent to the India Grievance Officer via post.

In addition to responding to and actioning on user complaints through the grievance channel, WhatsApp also deploys tools and resources to prevent harmful behaviour on the platform. WhatsApp claims that the app is focused on prevention because they believe it is much better to stop harmful activity from happening than to detect it after harm has occurred.

WhatsApp’s abuse detection is the primary parameter used to ban accounts. The abuse detection operates at three stages of an account’s lifestyle: at registration, during messaging, and in response to negative feedback. The feedback is received in the form of user reports and blocks.

A team of analysts augments these systems to evaluate edge cases and help improve effectiveness over time.

What to do if your account is banned

WhatsApp might not issue a warning before banning your account. If your account is banned, you’ll see the following message when trying to access WhatsApp: “Your phone number is banned from using WhatsApp. Contact support for help.”

If you feel that there was no reason why your account would be banned on the platform, just send an email to the messaging app to further investigate the issue.

The post WhatsApp bans over 17 lakh Indian accounts: What to do if yours gets banned too appeared first on BGR India.