WhatsApp said this could have a huge impact in areas such as education, healthcare, and helping with social causes, experts however flagged some concerns around how it could be misused to magnify hate speech. The company said they have built in checks and balances around this, and the company has only announced its launch to get more feedback around it and the product is still not live.
Interestingly, WhatsApp also said that they were going to roll out a feature around restricting forwarded messages to just one group instead of five.
A spokesperson for WhatsApp said that the idea to build the Communities feature came largely from the pandemic where people used the platform to provide relief and mobilise help – be it for food, medication, hospital beds, oxygen and so on. The company’s learning from the pandemic was to help people organise better and as a result help organise groups better.
“What Communities is going to do is allow anyone to create a community of their own and bring these groups together,” the spokesperson told ET. “And then they will have options such as announcements where the community administrator posts it and everybody gets to see it in one go, rather than copy pasting on different groups. It also provides a directory of linked groups and the third part is it allows within the community for different group members to create another group to see whether they have any aligned interests or not. So in a lot of ways, it is taking the world of different disparate groups or related groups.”
Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Executive Officer of Meta said the company was going to start rolling this out slowly but expects it to be an important evolution for WhatsApp and online communication overall. “I think community messaging will take the basic protocols behind one-to-one messaging and extend them so you can communicate more easily with groups of people to get things done together,” he said.
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WhatsApp said it is also making several improvements to how groups work — whether or not they are part of a Community. It said these features are rolling out in the coming weeks so people can start trying them out even before Communities are ready. “We’ve built the ability for admins to delete messages sent from anyone in a group to address errant or problematic messages,” Will Cathcart, Head of Meta’s WhatsApp tweeted on Thursday. “We’re excited to announce that reactions are coming to WhatsApp. We’ll also support larger file sharing up to 2GB at a time and 32 person group conference calls you can start with just one tap.”
This is where things got tricky for privacy experts. They said that Meta-owned WhatsApp is looking to bring in some of their admin control over content moderation to WhatsApp. A Meta group member can report hate speech, and its admin can take down content or put a troublesome member on ‘post approvals’ so each post needs approval before appearing. In contrast, they said a WhatsApp admin has very little power except for eviction (or switching to ‘admin-only’ where no one else can post).
“This is worrying because even ‘accidental admins’ have been arrested and even jailed for posts in a WhatsApp group, even though the Bombay HC ruled in April 2021 that admins can’t be held liable for posts by group members,” cyber and tech policy expert Prasanto K Roy said.
Another cyber lawyer who did not wish to be named said that this admin issue was concerning as it could hold the admin squarely responsible for anything that is said on a sub-group.
“Right now, I have an admin who’s supposed to be held liable if there is any improper content from a particular group,” he said. “What happens in a group within a group? Obviously, the larger group may not have anything to do with the subgroup where the content is actually inflammatory or abusive. WhatsApp will probably have to draw some sort of distinction to at least identify a person who will be admin in charge of a subgroup, for the purpose of imposing liability so at least some content can be moderated.”
WhatsApp on its part said that on an average they ban between 1.75-2 million accounts, most of it being driven by their own efforts and through anything picked up by the algorithm as ‘spammy behavior.’ the spokesperson said that even with the Community feature, users can report abusive or inflammatory messages to WhatsApp. Being an end-to-end encrypted platform, WhatsApp said it has no control over what is said in groups or communities and is giving the users the power to report incorrect behaviour and is looking to proactively address those reports when they come up.
“All the rules and best practices which are already in place are not going away anywhere,” the person said. “In fact, if anything with all of the measures, they are only going to get stronger. If there is somebody who is going to repeatedly try to use the community feature as a broadcast group, that is not something that would be encouraged. And we have checks and balances in place, which would address that.”
