From the 1.5 billion users WhatsApp has, 130K user accounts were banned in the past 10 days for sharing illegal material related to child sex abuse. This staggering number was reported by the Financial Times. Sources say videos and pictures showing abuse are shared ‘on a vast scale’ and WhatsApp isn’t curbing the problems despite mass bans.
In September, Israeli researchers warned Facebook it was easy to find and join groups sharing that type of content. FT found several of the identified groups were still active this week.
While WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption restricts the company (and law enforcement) from seeing the content of messages, WhatsApp has a zero-tolerance policy around child sexual abuse.
