WhatsApp Banned More Than 47 Lakhs Accounts in March 2023

The report is significant in the context of debates on content moderation by these big techs and the way these platforms protect and ensure users safety in their platform. However, the rules are not being enforced in its true spirit as a non uniform format is adopted by different platforms to remove content and promote policies by them. There is an explicit lack of efforts from the social media intermediaries evident from the fact that one of the biggest platforms, WhatsApp and Google do not publish the segregated data of issues on which they took proactive actions but publish the total number. On the other side, Twitter, published categorised data on which it takes proactive actions for instance in its report of March 2023 it suspended 812,115 accounts on Child Sexual Exploitation and Similar Content and 5,521 accounts on terrorism. This non-standard format makes it difficult for policy makers to understand real issues hence, efforts to mandate platforms to publish compliance reports goes in vain. Government needs to come out with a standard format in which intermediaries will be required to publish these monthly reports to achieve its true objective.