WhatsApp accounts being banned

WhatsApp has been banning users from its platform for being a part of WhatsApp groups with "suspicious" names. In the past few weeks, there have been reports of a number of users who have been getting banned from the social messaging platform on a permanent basis. Sounds scary?

A spate of recent investigations has revealed that the banning could have taken place from the messaging platform because they were a part of the group which has a "malicious" name, ergo, suspicious.

The reports of WhatsApp banning accounts was first encountered by a Reddit user Mowe11 who stated that their university group's WhatsApp name was changed to "child pornography" post which the group and its members were banned. The user stated that WhatsApp just did not ban the group, but also banned the members from using the messaging platform.

A different Reddit user also stated that WhatsApp put all their group members under a permanent ban. The social messaging platform did not leave a reason for their ban.

The reason for the ban was provided to another user who faced the same ban after the group name on WhatsApp was changed to something malicious. A separate Twitter report also stated that she got banned for being in a group with a malicious name. 

According to WhatsApp, the legal and acceptable use defines, "You must access and use our Services only for legal, authorized, and acceptable purposes. You will not use (or assist others in using) our Services in ways that: (a) violate, misappropriate, or infringe the rights of WhatsApp, our users, or others, including privacy, publicity, intellectual property, or other proprietary rights; (b) are illegal, obscene, defamatory, threatening, intimidating, harassing, hateful, racially, or ethnically offensive, or instigate or encourage conduct that would be illegal, or otherwise inappropriate, including promoting violent crimes; (c) involve publishing falsehoods, misrepresentations, or misleading statements; (d) impersonate someone; (e) involve sending illegal or impermissible communications such as bulk messaging, auto-messaging, auto-dialing, and the like; or (f) involve any non-personal use of our Services unless otherwise authorized by us."

However, in regards to how WhatsApp detects such malicious group names to ban them in the first place. In its blog post, WhatsApp stated, "To protect the privacy and security of our users, WhatsApp provides end-to-end encryption by default, which means only the sender and recipient can see the content of messages. To help prevent sharing of child exploitative imagery (CEI), WhatsApp relies on all available unencrypted information including user reports to detect and prevent this kind of abuse. Over the last three months, WhatsApp has banned approximately 250,000 accounts each month suspected of sharing CEI.

For example, we use photo-matching technology called PhotoDNA to proactively scan profile photos for known CEI. Should our systems detect such an image, we will ban the user and associated accounts within a group. While we may not be able to distinguish between a user sending or receiving CEI images, our zero-tolerance policy means we ban all group members from using WhatsApp."

We recommend refraining from changing the group info into something malicious, even as a prank. This is considering that could result in a ban on you as well as the group members.