By Favour Nnabugwu
Facebook Chief Executive Officerr and Co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has introduced Community Chats on Facebook.
Zuckerberg said that Community Chats let people to connect more deeply with communities in real time around the topics they care about in multiple formats, including text, audio and video.
He explained: “The experience seamlessly blends Messenger and Facebook Groups to allow people to connect when, where and how they want.”
Talking about how it works, he said:
“Admins can now start a conversation about a topic and get in-the-moment responses instead of waiting for people to comment on a post. And, rather than navigating multiple topics in a single Messenger group chat, the person who creates the Community Chat can organize chats into categories so group members can easily find what’s most interesting to them.”
According to him, “We have helped more than a billion people connect with loved ones in a trusted space on Messenger, and we know that people want to engage in real time with larger communities over shared interests.
“For example, a band’s fan group could have a “Breaking News” category with chats dedicated to new album drops, tour dates and group activities.”
“Admins can choose from several options to help their communities connect. They can start a chat for group members around a specific topic, an event chat for an outing or meetup, a view-only broadcast chat for admins to announce group-wide updates and an admin-only chat to collaborate with admins and moderators.
“Admins can also create audio channels so group members can share live commentary or receive real-time support. Participants also have the option to enable video once they’re in the audio channel.”
Zuckerberg added: “Given the more public nature of Community Chats, we have developed a robust suite of tools to help admins easily manage both chat and audio experiences”
“This includes moderation capabilities like blocking, muting or suspending group members, and removing members or messages, as well as Admin Assist, which allows admins to set custom criteria that will automatically suspend users, remove reported messages, and stop messages from ineligible authors or containing violating content from being sent.
“Members of Community Chats can also report messages to group admins or Meta, block users or leave a chat at any time. Learn more about privacy and safety controls in Community Chats.”
He concluded: “We are committed to building messaging experiences that help people connect with their communities, friends and families.
“As Community Chats rolls out to more people and groups around the world, we’ll continue exploring new features and capabilities to make it easier to connect with one another.
