By Elizabeth Culliford

(Reuters) – WhatsApp’s new Community feature is being tested by Meta Platforms. It allows groups to be organized in bigger structures, which could then be used at schools and workplaces.

WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart claimed that this feature would allow groups to be merged under greater umbrellas so administrators could issue alerts for a larger community.

Cathcart stated that this is aimed at communities in which you are already a participant in private communication. She cited Microsoft Teams (NASDAQ) and Salesforce-owned Slack as examples of similar communication types.

Although he said that there are no plans for charging the feature at the moment, he did say the beta test was being done with small groups of international communities. However, a future version may offer premium features to enterprises.

The message service is encrypted from end to end and boasts about 2 billion subscribers.

WhatsApp is currently facing abuses such as bulk messaging, misinformation spreading and hate speech. Cathcart explained that WhatsApp users won’t have the ability to search different Communities and that the company would utilize anti-abuse tools, safeguards and forwarding limits.

WhatsApp indicated that it would make changes to its group feature prior to Community launch. WhatsApp stated that it would be adding voice calling to up to 32 users, increasing file share to 2 gigabytes, and adding emoticons to messages.

In a Thursday posting, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta said that Communities will be launched in the next few months. He claimed that Meta would build community messaging tools for Facebook Messenger (NASDAQ), Instagram, and Messenger.

Meta intends to implement end-to-end encryption on all its messaging services as part its declared pivot toward privacy.