ShareChat has banned 50,000 profiles to keep pornographic, violent and fake content off of its platform, reports the Economic Times. A ShareChat spokesperson told MediaNama that the platform ran a campaign 6 months ago asking users to flag/report problematic content. However, the company refused to disclose which languages the 50,000 users were spread across, or how many accounts were actually flagged by users. The spokesperson said that a majority of the fake content is filtered out by a machine learning algorithm. Additionally, if an accounts repeatedly violates ShareChat's community guidelines, the accounts and even the device may be blocked by ShareChat's content moderation team. Once a device is banned, the user would be unable to create a new account on ShareChat from the same device. ShareChat CEO Fahid Ansar told ET that the company cooperates with law enforcement agencies on legitimate requests for user information. ShareChat is an Indian language messaging and social networking app, and currently supports 14 languages including Hindi, Tamil, Rajasthani, Bengali, Assamese and Marathi. ShareChat claims to have over 35 million monthly active users. In September last yeat, it raised Rs 720 crore from Shunwei Capital and existing investors Morningside Ventures of Hong Kong, Jesmond Global, Xiaomi, SAIF Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Changes to online safe harbor rules The crackdown on fake content comes just as the government is looking to amend the IT Rules governing Section 79, which cover intermediary liability, of the Information Technology Act. The section provides safe harbor to platforms including all payments providers,…
