WhatsApp appoints Komal Lahiri as grievance officer for India

Leading messaging app WhatsApp on Sunday has appointed a grievance officer Komal Lahiri for India. WhatsApp has written a detail on its official site about the process, how to flag concern and complaint, including those who spread the fake news on its platform. This is not the first time when WhatsApp has taken a step to curb fake news triggering mob lynching around the country.

The Facebook-owned company has made an announcement of appointing a ‘Grievance Officer for India’ on its site. In which it also mentioned that user can seek help through the mobile app, send an email or write into grievance officer Komal Lahiri, who is based out of the US.

According to Lahiri’s LinkedIn profile, she is the senior director, global customer operations and localisation, at WhatsApp. According to PTI sources, the appointment of the grievance officer was made at the end of August.

According to WhatsApp’s website, users can reach out to the company’s support team directly from the app under ‘Settings’ tab and if they wish to escalate the complaint, they can contact the grievance office too.  

As India is one of the biggest markets for WhatsApp having a user base of more than 200 million. Earlier, WhatsApp had limited message forwards to five people at a time.  And introduced a ‘forward’ label to help users identify whether the message is original or forwarded.

The latest development comes after the Supreme Court last month agreed to examine a petition alleging that messaging platform WhatsApp does not comply with Indian laws, including the provision for appointing a grievance officer. The apex court had given four weeks of time to reply.

The government had warned WhatsApp that it will treat the messaging platform as an abettor of rumour propagation while legal consequences will follow if adequate checks are not put in place.

A meeting chaired by Information technology minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and WhatsApp head Chris Daniels asserted that the company will have to find a valid solution to track the origin of messages on its platform. Prasad urged to set up a local corporate entity that is subject to Indian laws within a defined time frame as well as appoint a grievance officer.