WhatsApp said on Thursday that it banned 23.87 lakh Indian accounts in July. 14.16 lakh accounts were proactively banned before any user reports were received.

The data was disclosed in the messaging platform's monthly compliance report under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. WhatsApp identifies an Indian account as one with a phone number starting with the country code +91.

“WhatsApp is an industry leader in preventing abuse, among end-to-end encrypted messaging services. Over the years, we have consistently invested in Artificial Intelligence and other state-of-the-art technology, data scientists and experts, and processes, in order to keep our users safe on our platform,” a spokesperson for the company stated.

The compliance report publishes information about the platform's activities between July 1 and July 31, 2022. The platform received 574 reports, including ban appeals, account support, product support, and others, according to the report. It stated that action had been taken on 27 accounts.

WhatsApp stated that it uses tools and resources to prevent harmful behaviour on its platform. “We are particularly focused on prevention because we believe it is much better to stop harmful activity from happening in the first place than to detect it after harm has occurred,” the platform said in its report.

WhatsApp said in June that it has banned 22.10 lakh Indian accounts, up from 19.10 accounts banned in May. Similarly, in April, 16.66 lakh accounts were banned.

According to PTI, WhatsApp's parent company Meta stated in its report that it took action on 2.7 crore posts on Facebook and Instagram in July of this year. As part of its compliance with the IT Rules, 2021, the social media company took action against 2.5 crore posts on Facebook and 20 lakh posts on Instagram.