We have seen WhatsApp moving forward with a lot of interesting new features and updates recently. These have included new privacy-focused features and attempts to make WhatsApp Groups much more useful tools including giving WhatsApp Group admins the ability to delete other people’s messages. If that last one sounds a bit authoritarian to you won’t be happy to learn about a new WhatsApp Group feature that will give admins even more power.
The latest beta version 2.22.18.9 of WhatsApp for Android has served up a rather interesting new feature that will give all WhatsApp Group admins an even greater element of control over their groups. The new feature will give them the power to approve new group participants and conversely reject those that they don’t want to enter the group.
This might sound like a recipe for power-mad group admins to rule their groups with an iron fist but in reality, it is no more than is already seen on other messaging apps such as Telegram. In fact, it is highly likely that WhatsApp is copying Telegram as Telegram Groups are much better suited to manage much larger communities than WhatsApp Groups, precisely because of the added power the admins have.
The larger groups get the more that conversations will need to be guided and managed by rules and regulations as there will always be more friction points such as abuse, strong disagreements, and trolling the more participants there are. The admins need more power to be able to enforce the rules and regulations and for certain communities, they will need to prevent known bad actors from getting in in the first place.
If you add this news to recent reports on the increased group sizes that have recently landed on WhatsApp, it all fits together nicely.
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Image via: WABetaInfo
