WhatsApp, the popular social media app, is reportedly launching a new feature, Communities, which will offer larger and more organized discussion groups. This feature entered the testing phase during the early months of 2022.

Apart from helping schools, organizations, clubs, and private groups to be better organized and communicate more efficiently, the Communities feature will also enable larger file sharing, better 

admin control, 32-person voice and video calls, support for announcement groups and subgroups, polls, reactions, and emojis.

Communities can also offer end-to-end encryption and support a group of up to 1024 participants. 

While these new characteristics may look similar to that of Facebook Groups, WhatsApp Communities has been developed to cater to the needs of the members who are connected in the real world, since it is based on phone numbers. But, to balance the users’ demand for privacy, the phone numbers will only be visible to the admins and to the other members of the subgroup that you are present in. 

The Communities feature of WhatsApp poses a challenge to the other popular apps for large groups and private communications like Signal and Telegram, standard platforms like iMessage, and organizations-based platforms like Band, Remind, GroupMe, and TalkingPoints.

During an announcement, WhatsApp also focused on the Communities’ encryption aspects. It stated that the firm is planning to raise the bar of communication between organizations, without compromising their security and privacy. 

There are concerns that a feature like this may lead to dangerous behavior, and that the measures for WhatsApp are limited. The firm has stated that it will depend on the unencrypted information that is available about the Community to decide if it needs to take any action.

But it asserted that if a group is found to be engaging in human trafficking, coordinating violence, and distributing sexually abusive material on children, depending on the gravity of the situation, it may disband the Community, ban the members of the group, or ban individual members and admins.

Source Credit: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/03/whatsapp-officially-launches-its-new-discussion-group-feature-communities/