ShareChat, a social media platform that hosts content in 14 Indian languages, said on Wednesday that it has removed more than 487,000 pieces of content and 54,404 accounts since February for violating its community guidelines and terms of use. The company’s announcement came a day before the second phase of India’s general elections. ShareChat is one of 7 social media platforms that met with the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora in March and released a 'voluntary code of ethics' for the elections. Largest cull yet, says ShareChat Of the pieces of content removed, 13,195 were from ShareChat’s politics and news section, the company said, and 6,431 factually inaccurate pieces of content were taken down by a third-party fact-checking agency NewsChecker.in. The removal of over 54,000 accounts was its largest cull yet, ShareChat said. It targeted accounts that “shared harmful or abusive content, engaged in disruptive behaviour and used the platform in a way that violated its terms of use”. In January, ShareChat had banned 50,000 profiles to keep pornographic, violent and fake content off of its platform. However, the company had refused to disclose which languages the 50,000 users were spread across, or how many accounts were flagged by other users. Platforms' preparations for elections Facebook said earlier this month that it had removed 687 pages and accounts linked to the Congress party, and 15 pages, groups and accounts linked to Silver Touch, an Ahmedabad-based IT firm that created the Narendra Modi…
