Following Facebook, Line launches anonymous group chat rooms

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Line CTO Euivin Park. Photo credit: Line.

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Nine months after Facebook Messenger rolled out Rooms, its group chat feature where people can converse anonymously, Line is doing the same thing.

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Line, the messaging app that’s popular in Japan and a small handful of Southeast Asian countries, is calling its iteration Squares, the firm announced this afternoon. It launches today in Indonesia and South Korea.

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Line Square’s chat rooms will be based on interests, with each one able to accommodate up to 5,000 members. You can invite in friends via a link or a QR code. Group chatters do not need to share personal information or even their Line ID.

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The new feature has “an internal monitoring system in the form of an automatic filter on sensitive words and can report the user who uploaded the content that is inappropriate,” said the Tokyo-based social media company.

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Line is struggling in the face of Facebook and WhatsApp, recently losing active users in some of its most important countries. The chat app’s total number of users has fallen for three successive quarters.

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