WhatsApp adds new Communities feature to bring groups & people together

Social media company WhatsApp has added a new feature to WhatsApp called Communities.

WhatsApp said since it launched the platform in 2009, the company has been focused on how it can help people have the next best thing to an in-person conversation when they want to talk to an individual or a group of friends or family.

The Citizen was part of the media briefing where the new feature was revealed.

Mark Zuckerberg founder, chairman, and CEO of Meta which owns WhatsApp said the company’s messaging service is built around one-to-one text messaging which will stay at the core of what they do.

“But we’ve also been working on building out the next generation of private messaging. With a focus on privacy, safety and security, we’ve added video chats, voice messages, stories, commerce, payments and more to WhatsApp and Messenger.

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“With today’s launch, we’re taking this further and enabling people to not only communicate with close friends and contacts, but also with all of the different communities in your life.”

Zuckerberg said the company-built WhatsApp Communities to make it much easier to organize all users group chats and find information.

“You’ll be able to bring different group together into one community — for example, in addition to individual groups for different classes, you might have one overall community for parents at a school with a central place for announcements and tools for admins”

“We’re also adding new features to groups on WhatsApp, including reactions, large file sharing, and bigger group calls. And because this is WhatsApp, end-to-end encryption and safety features will be built in from the start,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg said the features will be rolled out gradually.

“We’re going to start rolling this out slowly, but I expect this to be an important evolution for WhatsApp and online communication overall. In the same way that social feeds took the basic technology behind the internet and made it so anyone could find people and content online, I think community messaging will take the basic protocols behind one-to-one messaging and extend them so you can communicate more easily with groups of people to get things done together.

“We’ll be building community messaging features for Messenger, Facebook, and Instagram as well. I’m excited to see how these progresses as we start testing WhatsApp Communities today and roll it out over the coming months.”

These are the features of Communities

Empowering admins

WhatsApp is building new tools for admins to manage conversations among their private groups. Admins are responsible for creating and managing Communities on WhatsApp. They can choose which groups become part of their Community by forming new groups or by linking pre-existing groups.

Community admins will also have the ability to unlink groups from the Community and remove individual members from the Community entirely.

In addition, group admins will be able to delete inappropriate or abusive chats or media for all members of a group. We’ll provide admins with resources on how best to use these new features.

Giving users more control over their chat

In addition to providing new tools for admins, users can control their interactions within Communities. WhatsApp’s existing settings allow users to decide who can add them to a group – and these settings will also apply to Communities.

Users will also be able to easily report abuse, block accounts, and leave Communities they no longer want to be a part of.

WhatsApp is also adding the ability to silently leave a group, so everyone in a group is not notified in case people decide the conversation is no longer for them.

Limits on Size, Discoverability, and Forwarding

While other apps provide group chats without limits, WhatsApp is focusing product development on meeting the needs of organizations and other groups where many people know one another already.

Unlike social media and other messaging services, WhatsApp will not support the ability to search for or discover new Communities on our service.

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To limit noise and overload, only Community admins will be able to send messages to all Community members – this is called the announcement group for the community.

“We will initially support community announcements for several thousands of users. Community members can chat in the smaller groups that admins have created or approved. We plan incremental increases to group sizes as we bring more controls to admins and users.

With the introduction of Communities, messages that have already been forwarded will only be able to be forwarded to one group at a time, rather than five, which is today’s forward limit.

WhatsApp said it believe this will meaningfully reduce the spread of potentially harmful misinformation in community groups.

End-to-End Encryption and Phone Number Privacy

Given the private nature of the chats within these close-knit communities, WhatsApp said it will continue to protect messages with end-to-end encryption so that only the members of the respective groups can see them and no one else.

This security technology protects the sensitive conversations among organizations, workplaces, and personal groups.

To help protect user privacy, your phone number will be hidden from the Community at large and only be visible to Community admins and others in the same group as you. This will help prevent unwanted contact and will also reduce the risk of scraping people’s phone numbers.

Action against abusive Communities

WhatsApp said the new measures and controls are designed to empower Community admins to address problems within their groups, since they know them best.

We will also continue to encourage users to report problematic Communities and messages to us directly. Whenever we become aware of Communities engaging in abuse such as distributing child sexual abuse material or coordinating violence or human trafficking, WhatsApp will ban individual Community members or admins, disband a Community, or ban all members of a Community.

“We will rely on all available unencrypted information including the Community  name, description, and user reports to take appropriate action.

WhatsApp said it will continue to build support for Communities in and will also listen closely to feedback from users about how it can help people connect privately, safely, and securely.

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