101: Building a Safe Community

Don’t set up Communities on WhatsApp that:

• Violate, misappropriate, or infringe the rights of our users or others, including privacy, publicity, intellectual property or other proprietary rights;
• Are illegal, obscene, defamatory, threatening, intimidating, harassing, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive;
• Instigate or encourage conduct that would be illegal or otherwise inappropriate, such as promoting violent crimes, endangering or exploiting children or others, or coordinating harm;
• Involve publishing false or misleading statements;
• Involve impersonating someone else;
• Involve bulk messaging, auto-messaging or auto-dialling.

As a community admin, you have agreed to use our Services according to our Terms and Policies. Action may be taken with respect to your account, including disabling or banning the community, in case of violations.

Understanding how to stay safe online is a priority for all communities. Make sure you and your members are aware of the safety and privacy features WhatsApp provides to protect yourselves against bad actors. Community and group admins should be particularly careful as bad actors could try to take over your accounts and share unreliable information, or add and remove members. You should encourage your members to secure their accounts, and remind them not to share community information with outsiders to limit the risk of exposing the community to harm.

Keep yourselves and your members safe by communicating the importance of:

• Using WhatsApp’s two-step verification feature to secure your accounts;
• Not sharing sensitive and personal information, such as email or physical addresses;
• Not asking anyone to share any personal information;
• Keeping another person’s personal data and images private by not sharing these without their consent.

Remind your members that they can use additional privacy features, such as disappearing messages and view once media, whenever they share personal information within the groups. It is also a good idea to encourage all members to learn more about how to stay safe on WhatsApp by using the tools and features we've designed to help users ensure their security and privacy.

As community admins, it is very important to be mindful when sending messages in the Announcement group. Don’t @mention any member in the Announcement group, as doing so will expose that contact's phone number to the entire community.

Account security tips

Communities on WhatsApp provides an additional layer of privacy as users cannot publicly search online for your community, but must be invited to join. Coordinate with your community and group admins to ensure that members are added to your community for the right reasons. Having people who are misaligned to the community's purpose or join with bad intentions could lower the community’s value to your members, or open the community to harassment, scams, or other harm.

It is important for you to actively manage and control how groups and members can join and interact with other groups under your community. Each community can contain a maximum of fifty groups plus the Announcement group, so monitor group creation to make sure that only relevant groups are linked to your community.

Make sure your group admins monitor new joiners to each group, and remove anyone from the group if they should not be in there.You can remove members by going into the group participants list and clicking on that member’s name.

You can invite groups and members to join a community using invite links or by adding the users to your contacts and adding them individually. Be careful where you post invite links. Never post these on public web pages. Always send invite links through private communication channels to people you know. If you add someone and they remove themselves, honor their decision.

Ensure that all admins are aware of their responsibilities, and trained to keep their groups safe and help them thrive. Look out for signs of potential conflict, harassment, bullying, and harmful content, and enforce your community rules consistently. Act quickly to delete inappropriate or untrustworthy messages by long-pressing on those messages, and block, report, and remove problematic groups and members if necessary.

Help admins and members to recognize negative content, in the context of your community’s norms and members’ expectations. Content may be problematic in your community if it:

• Is against your community rules;
• Is offensive or harmful to community members;
• Contains information that is false or untrustworthy;
• Contains suspicious links that could be scams, misinformation, hoaxes, or connected to other problematic content.

Remind your members to to ignore content or report behavior that looks suspicious and to think twice before forwarding messages.

WhatsApp limits message forwarding to slow down the spread of rumors, viral messages, and fake news. You can forward a message with up to five chats at one time, but if a message has already been forwarded, you can only forward it again to one group at a time.

If you see content or behavior that makes you concerned that you or anyone in your community is in immediate danger, reach out for support immediately. Contact your local emergency services, law enforcement or a suicide prevention hotline.

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