How We Approach Safety and Privacy in Community Chats

Community Chats in Messenger and Facebook allow people to connect more deeply with communities in real time around the topics they care about via text, audio or video. Messenger already helps more than a billion people stay connected to friends and family, and this feature helps people also connect with communities over shared interests.

Since they’re designed for more public conversations, we’re explaining our approach to making Community Chats trusted spaces. 

Empowering Admins, Moderators and Members

Admins and moderators can manage their Community Chats with a robust suite of content and moderation tools to help keep people safe. Admin Assist allows them 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. They can also manually delete messages, remove group members from chats and report messages to Meta. 

Members of Community Chats can report a group, category, chat or message, and they can block people or leave a chat at any time. People who are blocked or removed from a group won’t be able to view its Community Chat content. If someone joins a chat with a person they’ve blocked on Facebook, they will be able to see that person’s content but will receive a pop-up notice that the person they’ve blocked is present.

Audio channels in Community Chats will follow the same standards as other Messenger audio calls, providing people with controls to manage their experience. This includes the ability to block or remove someone, and to report an audio channel or participant to both Facebook or an admin. 

Protecting Your Privacy

We know people will want to understand how they can protect their privacy, and it’s important to understand how and when you will be visible in a Community Chat. Any member of a Facebook Group can join its Community Chats and see their history, with the exception of admin-only or invite-only chats. Private conversations should be reserved for private Messenger chats. 

We will continue to respect your existing privacy settings in Community Chats, and private accounts will work the same way they do today. For example, your account’s name and basic profile information will be visible to other members of a Community Chat, but Feed content by private accounts will be visible only to friends or followers. If a member of a Community Chat sends you a private message on Messenger, those messages will adhere to your message delivery controls, which means you can decide whether the request is sent to your chats list, your message requests folder or whether you want to receive it at all.

Finally, as with other parts of Meta, we collect information from Messenger and Facebook primarily to provide the service, improve the product experience and keep people safe and secure. We’re always improving our data collection processes, as well as carefully monitoring and verifying how we use data. Learn more about how we collect and use information from Messenger and Facebook.

Keeping Communities Safe

How we treat content and data in Community Chats is different from that of private messaging in Messenger. Given their more public nature, we use machine learning to detect and remove a wider breadth of potentially harmful content than in private Messenger chats, and we do not currently allow message forwarding from Community Chats. 

While all chats are subject to Facebook’s Community Standards, Community Chats are subject to these policies regardless of whether they’ve been reported. This means Facebook may automatically take down violating content or media, and repeated content violations could lead to a suspension of the feature, a Facebook Group or a user’s account. And, Facebook content shared in Community Chats that has been rated sensitive or misleading will be labeled as such so people can better decide what to read, trust or share. Learn more about our approach to content moderation and enforcement.

An Ongoing Project

We are excited by the opportunities that Community Chats will give people to interact and deepen relationships in their online communities. We know this is a work in progress, and we’re thinking carefully about the best ways to protect people and create the right tools to manage these communities. We’ll continue to consult with the people who use our products, as well as safety and policy experts, to build the best experience as we move forward.

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