Mark Zuckerberg announces rollout of Communities on WhatsApp, up to 32 person video calls

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, today, announced the launch of the Communities feature on WhatsApp. The executive said that the feature, which allows users to put related groups under a single community, will start rolling out to users globally in the “next few months”. The feature was first announced in April this year.

As mentioned above, Communities will allow users to manage their WhatsApp Groups by putting related groups in one place. Communities will have their own admins, who will be able to moderate messages and disseminate messages to everyone at the same time.

The feature seems useful for workplaces, which can create communities instead of using multiple WhatsApp groups for each team and business functions. Admins will be allowed to send messages to all groups at the same time, if required. 

“With Communities, WhatsApp is aiming to raise the bar for how organizations communicate with a level of privacy and security not found anywhere else. The alternatives available today require trusting apps or software companies with a copy of their messages. WhatsApp believes people deserve a higher level of security provided by end-to-end encryption,” the company said in a statement.

Zuckerberg said that the company has been working with 50 organizations in 14 countries to create the Communities feature.

To be sure, Communities will continue to include end-to-end encrypted messages and participants of one group won’t be able to access those in another.

The Communities feature is accompanied by two other new features for WhatsApp, which includes allowing up to 32 people to join video calls. The total numbers of users on WhatsApp Groups can also go up to 1024 now.