WhatsApp to Take Legal Action against Elements Abusing Its Platform

WhatsApp has threatened to take legal action against those who are publicly abusing its messaging platform advertising products and spreading individual agendas, bypassing the usage restrictions set by the company owned by Facebook.

In May this year during an investigation, Reuters have found WhatsApp clones and software tools, which are used by digital marketers and political activists during the run-up general election in India, bypassing anti-spam restrictions.

Till now, WhatsApp has focused their legal action on abuses for which it had found internal evidence. However now the company has said in a post titled “Unauthorized usage of WhatsApp” that it would start taking strict legal action against any entity that is found flaunting with public claims of its ability to abuse the messaging platform.

In the post, WhatsApp clearly said, “This serves as notice that we will take legal action against companies for which we only have off-platform evidence of abuse if that abuse continues beyond December 7, 2019, or if those companies are linked to on-platform evidence of abuse before that date”.

The move comes at a time when WhatsApp is struggling with challenges like spam behavior to push agendas or spread false information or the use of the messaging service to market products.

In May this year, Reuters in a research-based report said that the messaging platform is being misused ahead of India’s general election, through the use of free clone apps and the development of a software tool that allows users to automatically deliver bulk WhatsApp messages.

This software tools were not limited to India but have advertised their services through video and other online forums in Indonesia and Nigeria, where the elections were held this year.

Though fighting such spam in India is a major issue for WhatsApp, where it has more than 200 million users. Last year witnessed false messages circulation on WhatsApp has sparked several incidents of mob lynching in India, following which the company has restricted the forwarding of a message to only five users.

WhatsApp has said every month it blocks more than 2 million accounts across the world, for bulk or automated behaviour and it would continue to ban accounts based on the machine learning.

At present more than 1.5 billion users use the messaging platform worldwide and therefore it is significant to take such strict measures for the rational use of the platform.