WhatsApp launches this Thursday (14) in an experimental stage a new feature called communities, which will act as an umbrella housing several groups with thousands of users.
In practice, this is a large group of groups, which can have thousands of members, with all communication encrypted. Today, each WhatsApp group has a maximum of 256 members.
The feature will be in testing with some users in the coming months.
WhatsApp has committed to the TSE (Tribunal Superior Eleitoral) not to debut the “communities” in Brazil before the eventual second round of the presidential election, scheduled for October 30.
The company, however, does not promise to hold the launch of communities between the second round and the presidential inauguration in Brazil.
In the United States, in the 2020 presidential election, much of the disinformation that culminated in the January 6 Capitol storming circulated after the vote, mostly on YouTube. In Brazil, WhatsApp was the main vehicle for political disinformation in the 2018 election.
The target audience of the new feature are schools, businesses and building residents.
“We believe communities will make it easier for a school principal to bring all parents and guardians together to share important notices and create groups for specific classes and extracurricular or volunteer activities,” the company says.
But it was unclear how WhatsApp would prevent communities from being used for political or health disinformation. Communities will work similarly to the Slack and Discord apps.
Community administrators will have the ability to send messages (called notices) to all thousands of community members, as is the case today with Telegram channels.
The competing app’s channels have an unlimited number of followers — President Jair Bolsonaro’s, for example, has 1.3 million followers.
Communities, in principle, would have a limit of 10 groups with 256 members each — that is, 2,560 users. But WhatsApp is studying increasing the number of members in groups to 512 and increasing the number of groups in each community.
Administrators will be responsible for creating and managing WhatsApp Communities, choosing which groups will be part of them and creating new groups. In addition, they will also be able to remove groups and community members.
Users will be able to report abuse and block contacts. To join one of the groups in a community, simply access a link sent by an administrator.
In 2019, WhatsApp admitted that mass shootings, which are offered by intermediary marketing agencies and violate the app’s usage rules, were used in an attempt to manipulate the 2018 Brazilian election. The TSE later banned the practice.
The app reduced the number of possible forwards for each message from 20 to 5, to reduce the spread of misinformation. In 2020, during the Covid pandemic, WhatsApp set a limit on one forwarding for the most popular messages.
Will Cathcart, global president of WhatsApp, told Sheet that communities will not be a setback in the fight against disinformation.
He points out that communities will have mechanisms to stop viralization — messages that have already been forwarded can only be forwarded again to one group at a time, instead of five groups, which is the current limit.
However, as communities will potentially have thousands of members, who can forward messages to other groups in other communities, there is potential for the spread of false information.
All the content of the messages that circulate in the communities is end-to-end encrypted, that is, only the users have access to it, the company does not.
But WhatsApp claims it can ban members and communities involved, for example, in distributing child sexual abuse material or coordinating violence or human trafficking.
“We will rely on all available unencrypted information, such as the Community’s name and description, and user reports, to take appropriate action.”
In addition to communities, WhatsApp will launch innovations in the coming days such as the possibility for group administrators to delete wrong or problematic messages; an increase in the size of files that can be shared, up to 2 gigabytes, and a new mode of reactions with emojis.
Also in the coming days the company will launch voice calls with just one touch for up to 32 people. In the future, video calls on WhatsApp for 32 people will be launched, a direct competition to Zoom.
“We will start rolling out this feature gradually, but I hope it will be an important evolution for WhatsApp and for online communication in general,” said Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, on the company’s blog.
“In the same way that social feeds took the basic technology behind the internet and made it so that anyone could find people and content online, I believe community messaging will take the basic protocols behind messaging between two people and amplify it. them so you can more easily communicate with groups of people to get things done together.”
Brazil is WhatsApp’s second largest market, behind India. The company, however, does not disclose updated numbers of users – the last figure was “more than 120 million” in Brazil, in 2019.
According to a Panorama Mobile Time/Opinion Box survey from February this year, 99% of respondents had WhatsApp installed on their mobile phone, and 60% had Telegram. In January 2020, Telegram was installed on the cell phones of 27% of respondents, and in January 2021, in 45%.
The Dubai-based app gained millions of users after the backlash of WhatsApp’s new privacy policy in January 2021 left users unsure about sharing their information with Facebook.
In October 2021, another episode boosted Telegram’s user base — WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram were down for several hours.
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