Whatsapp Community Features Trial, Suitable For Companies And Schools

JAKARTA – Meta Platforms Inc, announced on Thursday, April 15 that, WhatsApp is testing a new feature called Community (Communitise). This new feature will have the ability to organize groups in a larger structure that can be used by workplaces (companies) or schools.

According to the head of WhatsApp, Will Cathcart, the feature will bring together groups, which have been limited to 256 users, under a larger umbrella where administrators can send alerts to thousands of communities.

"It's really community-oriented where you're a part of your life doing personal communication," Cathcart said in an interview with Reuters. He also cites Salesforce's Slack or Microsoft Teams as comparable types of communication.

He said there are currently no plans to charge for the new feature. This new feature which is still in beta is being tested with a small number of the global community. But he doesn't rule out offering "premium features for enterprises" in the future.

Whatsapp as a messaging service, which is end-to-end encrypted and has around two billion users, also said that the Community feature will also be end-to-end encrypted.

WhatsApp has been grappling with multiple allegations of misconduct, including mass messaging and the spread of misinformation and hate speech.

Cathcart said users would not be able to search for different Communities on WhatsApp and would use anti-abuse and protection tools such as forward limits for the new feature.

WhatsApp says there will also be changes to its Groups feature prior to the launch of the Community feature later. This Community feature will add the ability for group administrators to remove problematic messages from everyone's chats. It also introduces voice calls for up to 32 people at once. It also increases file-sharing capabilities up to 2 gigabytes and adds emoji reactions to messages.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post last Thursday that Community will roll out over the coming months. He said Meta will also build Community messaging features for Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram.

Meta also plans to roll out end-to-end encryption across other messaging services in its app as part of a more privacy-enhancing axis.