A community is essentially a collection of groups. Users can create a Community by adding groups with a similar theme. Community administrators can then manage groups within and send messages to all groups at once. This way individual conversations related to this group can be continued while receiving notifications that affect all groups at the same time. Communities will support end-to-end encryption. As for tracking, WhatsApp said it would not add the ability to search or discover new communities unlike “other apps”. The company will also reduce the ability to forward messages from the current limit of five to a single group at a time, in an effort to reduce the spread of misinformation within community groups. WhatsApp will also ban individual members or administrators of the Community and disband a Community if it detects illegal, violent or hateful activity within a Community. WhatsApp also introduces improvements to the way individual groups operate, whether they belong to a community or not. Groups can now have emoji reactions for messages, so that members can respond to a specific message without sending separate emoji messages. Administrators will be able to delete messages in a group, which will then be removed from everyone’s device. File sharing is being upgraded to support files up to 2 GB in size. Finally, one-touch voice dialing now supports up to 32 members. The new features will be released this week to a select group of users and will be slowly expanded to everyone else. Source 1 • Source 2
