WhatsApp’s New Tool Grants Group Chat Admins More Control

WhatsApp group chat admins now have more tools to manage them.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that WhatsApp now has a new that gives group chat admins more control over who can join a group.

The new tool also comes with a new WhatsApp feature that could make finding something in common with someone easier.

WhatsApp New Group Chat Tools

WhatsApp mentioned in a blog post that it added a new tool for group chat admins. The company mentioned that it gives group chat admins the ability to decide who can or cannot join a group.

Thanks to the new feature, group chat admins can click an "X" or a checkmark to either reject or approve a user when they share their group's invite link or make their group joinable in a community, per Tech Crunch.

This new tool complements WhatsApp's new Communities feature that helps bring separate groups together under one large-scale umbrella with a structure that bit fits them. One of the features that Communities introduced was the ability for a user in a community to switch between available groups whenever and several new things, like receiving updates from the Community's admins and organizing smaller discussion groups.

This feature explains the necessity to have the new tool WhatsApp created as it would give admins more control over their group privacy.

In addition to these new tools, WhatsApp also released a feature that lets users easily know which groups they have in common with someone in a community. Moreover, the company explains that this feature will let people in a community search for a contact's name to see the groups they have in common.

WhatsApp claims that the app can help people trying to remember the name of a group they know they share with someone or know which groups they have in common with someone else in the same community.

The company stated that it would roll out both features globally over the coming weeks as it continues to "build new tools to make groups the best experience for admins and members alike."

What Do WhatsApp Communities Do?

For those unaware, WhatsApp rolled out its new Communities feature in early Nov. 2022, which accompanied the release of the ability to host 32-person video chats and group chats capable of hosting 1024 users.

Zuckerberg said that WhatsApp's Communities feature makes groups better as it enables "sub-groups, multiple threads, announcement channels and more."

Messages sent within these communities are secured and end-to-end encrypted, allowing them to remain private. However, it is uncertain if group voice and video calls are also encrypted.

For context, video and video calls on WhatsApp are end-to-end encrypted for one-on-one conversations, per an earlier WhatsApp blog post.

There is concern that WhatsApp's Communities feature would allow misinformation due to how secure WhatsApp's encryption is and the few moderation tools Community admins have to combat such messages, per Engadget. However, the additional control WhatsApp's new feature affords admins could help them prevent the spread of misinformation within a community.