Understanding how to stay safe online is a priority for all communities. Make sure you and your members are aware of the safety and privacy features WhatsApp provides to protect yourselves against bad actors. Community and group admins should be particularly careful as bad actors could try to take over your accounts and share unreliable information, or add and remove members. You should encourage your members to secure their accounts, and remind them not to share community information with outsiders to limit the risk of exposing the community to harm.

Keep yourselves and your members safe by communicating the importance of:

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• Using WhatsApp’s two-step verification feature to secure your accounts;

• Not sharing sensitive and personal information, such as email or physical addresses;

• Not asking anyone to share any personal information;

• Keeping another person’s personal data and images private by not sharing these without their consent.

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Remind your members that they can use additional privacy features, such as disappearing messages and view once media, whenever they share personal information within the groups. It is also a good idea to encourage all members to learn more about how to stay safe on WhatsApp by using the tools and features we've designed to help users ensure their security and privacy.

As community admins, it is very important to be mindful when sending messages in the Announcement group. Don’t @mention any member in the Announcement group, as doing so will expose that contact's phone number to the entire community.