Meta (Facebook, Instagram) unveiled this Thursday a new tool for WhatsApp, the "communities", which will allow their administrators to address a large number of people, and provides better protection against the abuses observed on messaging.

The communities will bring together several existing groups, such as the parents of pupils from different classes of the same school, or even the inhabitants of a street who already participate in one or more neighborhood groups.

Only the “admins” will be able to send messages, the other participants will only be able to react to them, with emojis.

It will be "like bulletin boards in schools," said Jyoti Sood, a product manager at WhatsApp.

📣 We're excited to announce a new feature rolling out later this year called Communities!



With Communities, you'll be able to bring related groups together in a way that helps you organize meaningful connections easily and privately.

pic.twitter.com/eatAZQCmc3

— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) April 14, 2022


Access to this content has been blocked to respect your choice of consent

By clicking on "

I ACCEPT

", you accept the deposit of cookies by external services and will thus have access to the content of our partners

I ACCEPT

And to better remunerate 20 Minutes, do not hesitate to accept all cookies, even for one day only, via our "I accept for today" button in the banner below.

More information on the Cookie Management Policy page.


Added by admin

The new functionality, which must be tested for two months before being deployed internationally, evokes the "channels" of Telegram, another messaging service, which is used to broadcast messages to a large audience, in a public way (on channels open to all) or private (by invitation).

But WhatsApp users will not be able to search for communities they would like to join on messaging, they will have to be part of a group, and therefore have been added by an administrator.

"You can't just knock on the door of a community to enter it," explained Christina LoNigro, spokesperson for WhatsApp.

“Telegram allows conversations for hundreds of thousands of people;

WhatsApp communities will remain a private message service that allows people to communicate privately with people or groups they are close to,” she added.

Limit certain excesses

WhatsApp, which exceeded two billion users worldwide in February 2020, also insisted on the measures taken to limit certain excesses, such as the dissemination of disinformation on a large scale or harassment.

Meta faces many criticisms about these problems about its social networks but also about its messengers (WhatsApp and Messenger), where they are even more difficult to solve, since the exchanges are private and encrypted, at least in the case of WhatsApp.

Admins will be able to delete problematic messages in groups.

The content can only be transferred to one group at a time, to avoid spam phenomena.

Groups are limited to 256 people and Communities are initially limited to a few thousand users.

Communities can also be used for businesses.

"If a restaurant wants to form a group to share its menus or send promotions, it can do so," noted Jyoti Sood, before clarifying that Meta did not plan to "monetize" the communities.

high tech

Phishing: Attention, an attack targets WhatsApp users

high tech

WhatsApp: The transfer of messages again limited to stem the circulation of fake news

  • high tech

  • WhatsApp

  • Messaging

  • Application