WhatsApp is letting you stick your selfies in all places

Meta is updating WhatsApp with some enjoyable new methods to boost your chats and make messaging extra environment friendly. The favored messaging app will now have new digicam results, stickers, and a shortcut for reacting to messages.

WhatsApp is on the market on the web, desktop, and cell, however the app’s latest options are inclined to hit smartphones first. The most important change Meta has made to all of its messaging merchandise within the final 12 months was the mixing of Meta AI for answering questions and producing photographs, so it is good to see new WhatsApp options that don’t have anything to do with speaking to Massive Language Fashions.

Selfie stickers, digicam results, and handy reactions

WhatsApp is adopting options from its rivals

Meta

It is best to see these new WhatsApp options as each a porting over of issues the app was already doing, and the adoption of options of Meta’s messaging rivals. For instance, now you can pull up your generally used message reactions simply by double-tapping a message, similar to you may in Discord. The addition of selfie stickers is in kind of the identical vein. You possibly can flip any selfie you are taking in your cellphone right into a sticker simply by tapping on the “create a sticker” icon after which tapping on the digicam, based on Meta. That sounds just like the way you make stickers within the Messages app on iOS, would not it?

Digicam results originate from someplace even nearer to house. Meta added filters and backgrounds for video calls in October 2024, and now Meta is providing you the flexibility so as to add these 30 or so backgrounds, filters, and results to any video or photograph you ship in a message.

Associated

Meta just nuked 2 million WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook accounts

Preventing felony conduct, Meta has closed over two million accounts throughout its companies.

The corporate’s strategy to moderation will even impression WhatsApp

These adjustments to WhatsApp are minor within the grand scheme of issues, however they’re only a sliver of the adjustments Meta’s been making to the sorts of content material it is platforms will enable. When the corporate introduced it was disbanding its third-party program for fact-checking, the corporate additionally modified what sorts of speech it permits.

On Instagram, Fb, and Threads, language that will have beforehand been handled as hate speech is now allowed, according to Wired. The change is not as relevant on WhatsApp, the place there aren’t “posts” within the conventional sense, nevertheless it would not be stunning if extra formal adjustments got here to what WhatsApp permits down the street.