101: Building a safe community

Don’t set up WhatsApp Communities 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-dialing.

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

Make sure everyone knows the safety and privacy features WhatsApp provides to protect users from bad actors. Community and Group admins should look out for anyone trying to take over your account, share misinformation, or add or 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. As a Community admin, you can remove members, delete irrelevant messages (for up to 2.5 days after it is sent) to keep the community safe.

Keep yourself 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 personal data and images private by not sharing these without consent.

Remind your members they can use additional privacy features, like disappearing messages and view once media, whenever they share personal information within Groups. Encourage all members to make use of the tools and features we've designed to ensure your security and privacy.

For Community admins, it’s 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.

How to stay safe on WhatsApp

Account security tips

WhatsApp Communities provides an additional layer of privacy as users can’t publicly search online for your community, but must be invited to join. Coordinate with your community and Group admins to ensure 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's important to actively manage and control how Groups and members can join and interact with other Groups in your community. Each community can contain a maximum of fifty Groups plus the Announcement Group, so look out for new Group creation to make sure that only relevant Groups are linked to your Community.

Make sure your Group admins keep an eye on new members and remove anyone that should not be there. You can remove members by going into the Group participants list and clicking on that member’s name.

You invite Groups and members to join a community using invite links or by adding the users to your contacts individually. Be careful where you share invite links. Never post these on public web pages. Always send invite links through private communication channels to people you know. You can also turn on the group join request setting for groups that would require admins to review any new participants before joining the group. If you add someone and they remove themselves, honor their decision.

About group join requests

Make sure all admins are aware of their responsibilities and trained to keep their Groups safe. 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 problematic content

Remind your members 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 misinformation. You can forward a message to five chats at a time. If a message has already been forwarded, you can forward it to up to five chats, including a maximum of one group.

If you see content or behavior that concerns you,or if 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.

About spam and unwanted messages
About forwarding limits