WhatsApp is deleting 2 million accounts per month to arrest the spread of fake news and misinformation, the company revealed in a white paper titled 'Stopping Abuse' released in India earlier this week. WhatsApp is deleting these accounts for bulk or automated behaviour, over 75% of the accounts were banned by the company without any recent user report, it said. WhatsApp's white paper findings WhatsApp said that spam accounts try to send high volumes of messages soon after registering - it bans 20% of the monthly accounts at registration. Additionally, messages from automated accounts rarely have a "typing" status displayed. WhatsApp has designed its system to identify bulk or automated accounts originating from a suspicious phone number or computer network. Attackers had also attempted to game the hardware to try to control several accounts at the same time. Banning at registration: "For example, an account registered five minutes before attempting to send 100 messages in 15 seconds is almost certain to be engaged in abuse, as is an account that attempts to quickly create dozens of groups or add thousands of users to a series of existing groups. We ban these accounts immediately and automatically." WhatsApp has been under the Indian government's scanner due to the rampant abuse on the platform, which has led to several deaths as well. Outside of this, there's a national election upcoming - an ET report cited a senior executive, presumably from WhatsApp, as saying that Indian political parties were abusing WhatsApp ahead of the general…
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