ShareChat bans more than 50k profiles to battle toxic content

Fake news has been a headache for the content and widely used social media platforms for a few years now. Several platforms concerned have taken different steps to control this menace.

In WhatsApp the fake news was spread via forwarded messages, so the platform took a step to label those messages as ‘Forwarded’, and disallow users from forwarding messages to more than five people at once.

ShareChat, a vernacular content-based social media platform has a different mechanism via which users spread offensive and fake content like hate speech, pornography, violence, fake news, spam, and also engaged in impersonation among others misconduct.

The company sought out the help of the users to battle these practices and ran campaigns whereby it asked the users to report any profile that engaged in any of these activities.

Once a profile is reported, the content regulator team at ShareChat offices reviewed the complaint and accordingly took an action, the most severe being banning a profile.

In recent days, the company has banned more than 50,000 profiles of its 35 million monthly active user base, keeping in perspective the backlash from the government as well as users against such venomous content.

The platform allows users to post content in 14 local languages including Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Odia, Marathi, Gujarati, Assamese, Kannada, Bengali etc. The numbers reported by ET were only from the users of recently added Eastern languages.

Similar campaigns were run in several regional languages and many profiles were banned there as well, but the figures remain unknown for the same.

The Ankush Sachdeva run company also claims to be careful while regulating content as it understands the fact that there is a thin line between regulation and censorship that should not be crossed. It doesn’t allow political agendas to rule the content regulation process.

Of late, ShareChat had deployed Machine Learning team that is also helping it in weeding out pornography, abusive and violent content.

Also Read: ShareChat’s formidable growth story: Can it become by default social network for Bharat?

As far as the new IT Act was concerned, the company did not make any comment apart from clarifying that it only shares information with the government after reviewing a request’s legitimacy.

The company believes that the future of content regulation lies in Artificial Intelligence that automatically analyses and removes any content that violates the platform's policies and has a lot to learn from international platforms regarding the same.