“to give people the power to create new communities and bring the world closer together.”
No, it’s not the return of Orkut. In fact, this is the new mission of Facebook for the next decade, and surely, it was one of the most striking phrases said by Mark Zuckerberg at the first meeting of communities present on the platform, which took place last Thursday (22) in Chicago, USA.
Since the beginning of the year, seeking ways to reduce the circulation of fake news and hate speech within the network, Zuckerberg has already announced several changes to make the content circulating within Facebook safer. But now it was time to turn the tide, not just creating means to mitigate the impact of negative content, but also finding ways to increase the circulation of positive content on its platform through the creation of communities.
To this end, Facebook decided to invest and empower group administrators, believing that this way it will be possible to gather users around common interests, bringing people together so that they have a support network within Facebook.
This power to administrators will come in the form of new tools within the platform, which should facilitate group management and expand communities.
Discover the new features:
Group Insights
Just like advertisers, group administrators will now have access to real-time metrics, allowing them to track growth, members, number of posts, and times of highest engagement.
Membership Request Filters
This will allow administrators to sort and select requests through filters such as location and gender, enabling them to respond to or deny requests more quickly.
Scheduled Posts
This will allow group administrators and moderators to create posts at any time and schedule them for any day and time.
Member Removal
Administrators will be able to ban malicious members all at once along with all content produced by them in the group, such as posts and comments, in addition to having the option to remove other people added by them.
Group Recommendations
Still in testing phase, this feature will allow administrators to recommend other similar groups to the members of their own group, reinforcing the idea of creating large communities.
With the new tools, Facebook's goal is to transform the current 100 million members of significant groups within the network into 1 billion. In other words, what is expected is that soon at least half of all active Facebook users will be engaged and participating in groups.
Mark Zuckerberg's message regarding the purpose of all this is clear and apparently quite noble:
“A mission is not just a statement. It is a philosophy of nuances and hopes for the world. We will fulfill our mission not through the repetition of a statement, but through the work that each of us does every day. If we can build communities and unite people, then we can change the world.”
No one doubts the influence of Facebook in building relationships and modern society anymore. Now we just have to wait and see if the network will indeed transform into large virtual communities as Facebook hopes, at the same speed that we all have transformed into connected beings through social networks.
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