Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that “Community Chats” are coming to Messenger and Facebook Groups. The new features aims to help people build social connections in real time over shared interests. 

It allows Messenger groups to organize chats into categories, including audio and video channels for real-time discussion, admin-only chats for announcements and event chats. This aims to make it easier to keep track of fast-moving conversations involving many people.

Facebook will begin testing the ability to start Community Chats directly in Messenger and will be expanding the chat experience to more Facebook Groups in the coming weeks. 

According to Facebook, the community Chats helps people connect with their communities in real time around the topics they care about on both Facebook and Messenger via text, audio and video. 

It also allws admins to start a conversation about a topic and get in-the-moment responses instead of waiting for people to comment on a post. 

Community Chats will allow people to connect with their communities on Messenger in addition to friends and family. 

“Given the more public nature of Community Chats, we’ve developed a robust suite of tools to help admins easily manage both chat and audio experiences,” the company announced.

This include, noderation capabilities like blocking, muting or suspending group members, and removing members or messages. 

It also include 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.