WhatsApp banned over 8.5 million accounts, restored 33 in September

WhatsApp said it had banned more than 8.5 million accounts in September as part of its monthly exercise to weed out scrupulous accounts. In its latest report, the Meta-owned chat app said the ban represents the company's commitment to ensure digital safety and curb misuse of the platform for illegitimate activities. The company also reinstated 33 accounts that appealed their bans.

Over 8,000 complaints

The report underscores that WhatsApp had received 8,161 grievance complaints in September, including 3,744 appeals against already-imposed bans. However, WhatsApp took action only on 33 and restored them. Of the total, 3,196 complaints were complaints related to support, but the company heeded only 61 of them. There were 870 safety-related complaints, while those related to account support and product support totaled 238 and 113, respectively.

WhatsApp said that it did not take any direct action on accounts solely based on their issues despite a large number of complaints. Instead, it told users to take help of in-app reporting tools to flag harmful behaviour while chatting with others.

In September, WhatsApp blocked 8,584,000 accounts, 1,658,000 of which were banned even before user flagged them. A month before, in August, the Meta-owned company banned 8.46 million accounts, of which 1.66 million were proactively blocked. Then, in July, the company imposed a ban on over 6 million accounts with 1.09 million blocked proactively.

According to the Meta-owned company, it received 10,707 grievance reports in September, including 4,788 ban appeals of which only 15 were resolved.

WhatsApp also said that it acknowledged two orders from the Grievance Appellate Committee in September.

WhatsApp working on new features

In other news, WhatsApp recently announced that users will soon be able to add contacts to their app directory from any devices. That means they could add a contact on WhatsApp Web or its app on PC or Mac, over and above the existing facility to add contacts on a phone. "These WhatsApp contacts are ideal for when you are sharing your phone with others or if you want to separate personal and business contacts when managing more than one WhatsApp account on your phone," WhatsApp said.