New WhatsApp channels... What are they?



WhatsApp announced Channels: a simple, reliable, and private way to receive important updates from people and organizations, directly within WhatsApp. Channels are being designed within a new tab called "News," where you'll find the statuses and channels you've chosen to follow, separate from your chats with family, friends, and communities.

Channels are a one-way group messaging tool that allows admins to send text, photos, videos, stickers, and polls. To help you identify channels to follow, we're building a searchable directory where you can find your hobbies, sports teams, updates from local officials, and more. You can also navigate to channels from invite links sent in chats, emails, or posted online.

The service strives to provide privacy among group messaging services. This begins with protecting the personal information of moderators and followers. As a channel moderator, your phone number and profile picture will not be visible to followers. Similarly, following a channel will not reveal your phone number to the moderator or other followers. You decide which channels to follow, and your decision is completely private.

Similar to how we design messaging, we don't believe channel updates should stay with you forever. Therefore, we won't keep channel history on our servers for more than 30 days and will provide ways for updates to disappear from followers' devices more quickly. Moderators will also have the ability to block screen captures and forward messages from their channels.

Finally, WhatsApp will give administrators the ability to choose who can follow their channels and determine their discoverability in the directory. Because channels are intended to reach a broad audience, they are not end-to-end encrypted by default. We believe end-to-end encrypted channels for a limited audience make sense in some cases, such as nonprofits or healthcare organizations.