HIGHLIGHTS
• WhatsApp is cracking down on individuals that violate its terms of use.
• WhatsApp will take legal actions against entities that send bulk messages.
• WhatsApp will take legal action against offenders starting December 9, 2019.
WhatsApp, over the course of past one year, has faced a lot of flak for being unable to contain the spread of bulk and misleading messages on its platfom. The company so far has relied on its system to ban the accounts that bulk or automated behaviour on its platform. But now the company is going a step further in its fight against the accounts that display such behaviour by suing the WhatsApp accounts associated with such behaviour.
Starting December 7, the Facebook-owned social messaging app will take legal action against individuals or companies that violate the app's terms of use. "Beginning on December 7, 2019, WhatsApp will take legal action against those we determine are engaged in or assisting others in abuse that violates our Terms of Service, such as automated or bulk messaging, or non-personal use, even if that determination is based on information solely available to us off our platform," WhatsApp wrote in its FAQ page titled Unauthorised Usage of WhatsApp.
The company, however, did not specify what sort of legal action it would take in an event it finds an individual or an entity to be violating its terms of use.
The company, in the past couple of months , has been investifying its efforts to fight bulk messages and automated behaviour. In a white paper published back in February this year, had detailed the steps it was taking to fight such behaviour.
"We have built sophisticated machine learning systems to detect abusive behavior and ban suspicious accounts at registration, during messaging, and in response to user reports We remove over two million accounts per month for bulk or automated behavior - over 75 per cent without a recent user report," the company wrote in the whitepaper.
The company, ahead of the Indian Lok Sabha Elections 2019, had also placed a number of restrcitions within the app to restrict users from sharing bulk messages containing misleading information. However, a Reuters investigation found out that the digital marketing firms were using a $14 (Rs 970) tool to bypass WhatsApp's restrictions and send bulk WhatsApp messages to users.