To keep its users safe, WhatsApp has revealed that it banned as many as 1.66 million Indian accounts by April 2022. This extreme action is being taken to prevent malicious activity on the app, according to the disclosure report released today. WhatsApp says it has “…consistently invested in artificial intelligence and other state-of-the-art technology, data scientists and experts, and processes to keep our users safe on our platform”.
“We are mainly focused on prevention because we believe it is much better to stop malicious activity in the first place than to detect it after damage has occurred,” a WhatsApp spokesperson said.
“Our goal is to identify and stop abusive accounts as quickly as possible, so it’s not realistic to identify these accounts manually. Instead, we have advanced machine learning systems that take action to ban accounts 24 hours a day , 7 days a week,” the spokesperson added. WhatsApp also revealed that its systems are evaluating the account and taking appropriate action after negative feedback was reported.
The company said it bans an account in several cases, including when an account collects negative feedback, such as when other users submit reports or block the account.
“The abuse detection works at three stages of an account’s lifestyle: at registration, during messages, and in response to negative feedback, which we receive in the form of user reports and blocks. A team of analysts is expanding these systems to analyze edge cases. evaluate and help improve our effectiveness over time,” WhatsApp said.
