About 95% of WhatsApp users in India receive annoying calls and texts through online activities: survey

About 76% of respondents said they had noticed an increase in annoying calls or texts due to their conversations with WhatsApp business accounts and their activity on Facebook or Instagram, online polling firm LocalCircles said on Wednesday.

According to the survey conducted between February 1 and February 20, 95% of WhatsApp users surveyed by LocalCircles in India say they receive one or more annoying messages every day, with 41% claiming to receive four or more such messages per day.

When contacted, a spokesperson for Meta said WhatsApp has systems in place that allow WhatsApp to more quickly suspend a company from messaging when people provide feedback about a poor quality experience. .

“If a business receives excessive negative feedback, we may limit or remove a business’s access to WhatsApp,” the Meta spokesperson said.

LocalCircles said that to understand whether users had such an experience based on privacy policy changes and to quantify the magnitude of such instances, it asked respondents if they were seeing an increase in unsolicited commercial messages on WhatsApp. based on their conversation with professional WhatsApp users. or your activity on Facebook or Instagram.

“Nearly three quarters or 76% of the 12,215 WhatsApp users who answered this question said they saw an increase in annoying or unsolicited commercial messages due to their conversations with WhatsApp business accounts and their activity on Facebook/ Instagram, Meta-owned platforms in addition to WhatsApp,” the investigative report said.

The survey claims to have received over 51,000 responses from citizens located in 351 districts of India.

LocalCircles said survey results indicate that the majority of WhatsApp users surveyed are using tools available to them, such as blocking or archiving, and yet spam messages continue, indicating that senders are also changing number or that there are so many that the threat continues.

“The majority or 73% of the 12,673 respondents to this question indicated that they exercise the option of blocking the numbers from which unsolicited commercial messages originate,” the report said.

Meta’s spokesperson said the user’s choice is key and gives them the option to block a business account.

“We would like to share that at WhatsApp, user choice is at the heart of what we do. Messaging is the new way of doing business that is better than texting, email and phone, which are become overloaded and spammy. Our rule is that whether people want to talk to a company or not, the choice is up to our users,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson shared that he is constantly working with the companies to ensure the posts are useful and expected.

“We allow businesses to only send a certain number of messages per day…We recently added the ability for businesses to create an easy way for customers to opt out of receiving certain types of messages directly in chat “said the spokesperson. said.