Today, Explained - Huge week for the group chat

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

This week offered some lessons on, among other things, how to text responsibly 👊🇺🇸🔥 This episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey and Avishay Artsy, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Further reading: Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal, Texting do's and don'ts for 2024. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Democratic Congressman Jared Moskowitz holds up a posterboard showing emojis used by President Trump's national security officials in the Houthi group text chat. Image courtesy of the office of Jared Moskowitz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's been a huge week for the group chat. Not one of yours, certainly not one of mine. I'm talking about the Huthy PC Small group chat, of course. But you've never talked to him before, so how's the number on your phone? I mean, I'm not an expert on any of this, but it's just curious, how's the number on your phone? Well, if you have somebody else's contact, and then it, and then somehow it gets sucked in. Oh, someone sent you that contact. Nobody's texting or plants.

As a matter of fact, they even changed the title to attack plants. Now it turns out Judge Boasberg has actually been assigned to another high profile case. This one surrounding the fallout from the signal messages in the Atlantic article, which we've been talking about all day, right? Never before has the group chat been subject to this kind of scrutiny, and it's been a great reminder that we have lost our way. On Today Explained, we're gonna talk about texting

and how we kind of forgot how to do it right. Or maybe we never knew how to do it right in the first place. Craft is where function meets style. It's where precision meets performance. It's where precision meets performance. It's where doing it yourself meets showing the world what you're capable of. The all-new Acura ADX is a compact SUV crafted to take you where you need to go

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yourself meets showing the world what you're capable of. The all-new Acura ADX is a compact SUV crafted to take you where you need to go without any compromises. With available Google built-in, all-wheel drive, and a 15-speaker bang and all-of-some premium sound system, the all-new ADX is crafted to be as alive to the world's possibilities as you are. The all-new ADX, crafted to match your energy. Acura, precision crafted performance. Learn more at Acura.com.

This is Today Explained. And this is Sean Ramosforum here with Max Reed of the Reed. Max, Substack Max, has been thinking about group chats for years. In fact, he wrote a piece for New York Magazine way back in 2019 called Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again. And since a certain group chat made the internet fun this week, for at least some, we thought we'd ask Max, did we, this week, at least in the United States, hit peak group chat? Yeah, I mean, I have to say, you know, as a journalist

and as somebody who writes about the future making predictions, it felt extremely vindicating to go from a kind of trend piece about how me and a bunch of my friends seem to be turning to group chats to revelations that national security operations at the absolute highest and most top secret level were also being conducted on group chats. Are you in any of those kinds of group chats? I mean, not to the best of my knowledge, but there's a couple of group chats where I don't know every single phone number in there. And like maybe Michael Waltz has somehow infiltrated

and is just waiting to drop some emoji. It gets sucked in. What kind of group chats are you in, Max? Well, you know, I'm a father, and I would say most of my group chats these days are with other parents of similarly aged kids to coordinate play dates or to do the thing where, you know, it's 3 p.m. on a Sunday

and you're going absolutely insane, and so you just have to throw a flag up and really hope that some other parent will meet you at the playground. I mean, a group chat that's almost exclusively about the movie Hunt for Red October, though also sometimes about submarines and fighter jets, if they appear in the news.

Does it have a clever name? It's called Ramias' Boys, after Captain Marco Ramias, who is Sean Connery's character in Hunt for Red October. A deep cut for the casual fan of the Hunt for Red October. Yeah, exactly. Your signal said nothing about Torpedo. I'm also in a group chat dedicated to analyzing and reading Ross Douthat columns,

the New York Times columns. What's that one called? It's called Douthat Chat Natalists Only. I want to be clear, that's an ironic name. I'm not a political natalist or anything. Though I have to admit this is one of two Ross Doubt That Group chats I'm even aware of. There's another one called the Falcons Children, which is named after Ross's fantasy series. It sounds like I have a really disordered relationship to Ross Doubt That. I want to be clear this is very common for Millennials to have this, to have group chats about Ross Doubt That.

Does he know about them? I hope not. I hope someone sends this to him, great. I'm also in a group chat with three former co-workers called the executive team, where we just pretend to be hustle-minded entrepreneurs and send each other motivational memes and quotes. And I find this group a little upsetting

because I know the other three members of this group are in a group called the Giggle Kids that I'm not allowed to be in. So, you know, this is an example of the kind of social friction that group chats can create. That's tough. I've never been in the case where I found out about a group chat that like all my friends were in

that I'm not in, but presumably they exist. I think every group chat has an equal number of group chats. That is, everybody in the group chat except for one person. Oof. What I think was special about this week is whether you have 40 different group chats on your phone or if you just have one called like family chat where you text with your parents or your kids. This week it was clear that everyone has a lot of group chats going on.

So many, perhaps, that they can't even keep track of who's in them. That, this week, became universal. How did we get here? It's a good question. [♪ music playing. So, for most of, I would say, the history of the kind of social internet that we all grew up on, starting with Facebook and before it MySpace. Most of the social networks and a lot of what you would do socially online was organized around the term of art as a social graph.

It was organized around networks of connections that you made in real life and you maintained a profile where you also had all those other connections, and you would post things, say, to a feed, a la Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, that would usually reach all of those people equally, which meant, you know, early on, I think that was sort of fun and new and strange to be, you know, posting photographs that your co-workers and your family and your close friends and your old college friends might all see. that your coworkers and your family and your close friends and your old college friends might all see. But over the years, it also became clear that this came with some unpredictable externalities, let's say that it was a lot of things that you might say to coworkers or to friends or to your family that you wouldn't want to say to one of those other groups.

And we began to sort of experience a phenomenon that the academic Dana Boyd called context collapse where the different contexts where you might interact with a bunch of different people are eliminated. And all of a sudden you find yourself in hot water, say, for putting something on Facebook that was really meant for your friends, the kind of thing you would say, like if you're out, you know, on a night on the town with your friends,

and then your aunt and your uncle and your grandparents and your parents all see it, and you realize that actually maybe this was not something that you wanted them to see. This sort of slow motion realization of the reality of context collapse is happening at the same time that Facebook and a bunch of other big tech companies are doing a lot of, I guess I would call it soul searching, about their role in the 2016 election, in Brexit, in the general kind of populist backlash of the mid-2010s. So you have what was kind of termed at the time the tech lash.

You know, and there was a lot of writing and criticism. You know, all the tech CEOs had to go up in front of Congress and defend themselves. Senator, we run ads. I see. Everybody was really down on Facebook. Facebook in particular, but in general, of Congress and defend themselves. Senator, we run ads. I see. Everybody was really down on Facebook, Facebook in particular, but in general

on all of these companies. And I think you saw at that moment, both a sort of bottom up and a top down move to take a lot of the social interaction that had previously been happening on public platforms like Facebook or Instagram or Twitter and move it into private group chats. It feels like at some point the group chats got a little overwhelming.

Is that the case for you with all these parenting group chats where there's just a new one? Oh, there's a new one for this birthday party, and there's a new one for, I don't know, this school event, and then also while that one's blowing up, there's something going on with your family chain, and there's something going on with your hug for red October chain. Yeah, it is, I mean, I am a writer who works from home, which means I'm always looking for reasons to procrastinate

and not do my work, so my full-time job is keeping up on group chats, but my wife, with whom I'm in a bunch of these chats, has a real job and works quite hard at it, and constantly says she comes back to like 60, 70, unread messages, and she's like, this is too overwhelming, I just can't, I'm not going to read all these messages,

I'm not going to reply. And I think that's probably true for a lot of people. I think if you made the mistake of marrying someone whose job is computer all the time, everything's computer. then probably you're even worse at it. And when did that happen? Was that like the pandemic when we just decided we'd be like typing away all day? I don't really know when it happened, but it happened and it felt like we

weren't properly prepared for it. Yeah, I think it's hard not to notice that the increase, at least the perceived increase in the amount of time we spend in group chats, the amount of time we spend in group chats, the amount of messages we send in group chats seem to happen during a time when most of us, many of us were trapped inside our houses, or at the very least sort of trapped inside our cities. We weren't visiting friends who lived far away.

We were sort of desperate for socializing with people, and group chats were a really easy-to-hand way of doing that. And a little bit like working from home, it's something that hasn't gone away, even as the barriers to in-person interaction have gone away. Yeah. And then of course this week, one of those group chats somehow became the biggest story in the United States. I mean, we probably aren't at any danger, we common plebs, of being added to a national security group chat anytime soon.

But it did feel like something about this story clicked for a lot of people because there was something innately just normal and dumb and human and relatable about it. Oh, totally. I mean, I think about it compared with some of the other scandals about national security secrets, like improper classification and improper leakage, thinking about various security documents that ended up at Mar-a-Lago or in Joe Biden's garage, or sort of infamously the Hillary Clinton email scandal. And none of the rest of us, very few of the rest of us at least, have access to reams of classified information that we might ever have in a box and put in a storage unit. Whereas mistakenly adding

someone to a group chat who you didn't mean to, or finding yourself in a group chat where people don't realize that you're in there, that's something that can happen to anybody. There's a much clearer narrative about exactly the screw up here that doesn't require you to kind of place yourself in the position of a president or whatever. You know, they could have been planning a surprise birthday party and accidentally like added somebody who the subject of the birthday or just somebody who wasn't related at all who now can see all of it. or just somebody who wasn't related at all who now can see all of it.

maxread.substack.com The group chats didn't come with a how-to manual, but clearly people need one. So, the do's and don'ts of texting in the Year of Our Lord 2025, next up on the show of Our Lord, Today Explained. This is Advertiser Content from Mercury. Hey, I'm Josh Muccio, host of The Pitch, a Vox Media podcast where startup founders pitch real ideas to real investors. I'm an entrepreneur myself. I know and love entrepreneurs, so I know a good pitch and a good product, especially

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Learn more at Acura.com. Today, today explained. I am Tatum Hunter and I am an internet culture reporter at the Washington Post. And you are brave enough to tell people how to text. Well, I think that our lives play out increasingly online. Today, when you say something like internet culture, that's just culture a lot of the time, right?

You talk about texting etiquette, like, yeah, that's just how we communicate. So I'm super into etiquette because I report on how the internet, like, trickles down into our lives and changes our relationships. And this, this like this is Contentious for people how to behave in a group chat on a text thread Welcome back ladies today. I really wanted to talk to you about the do's and don'ts of texting This is how to text the guy that you like first thing You're gonna do is get rid of this idea that you can't text him first if you text me longer than five

Sentences that is now a phone call. You send really long text messages. If you multi, multi, multi-text, all of those tend to be low value needy behaviors. If you're tired of having dry texting conversation, we all are. Let's fix that, okay? Should we start with the do's

or should we start with the don'ts? Let's start with the don'ts because I think that's spicier for people. Okay, great. Let's go. For the haters, we'll start with the don'ts. Do you have a list? How do you want to get into this? I absolutely have a list.

Okay, maybe like three big don'ts. All right. One don't is don't use group texts for something that they weren't created for. If everybody has that group text from a bachelorette party in like 2018 that people will still pop into to like share photos of their kids or ask questions about, you know, that need, those have to die once you're done with the reason that you created them. So if you have a group chat with your parents because you're related, that can keep going

forever because you'll always be related. But if you have a group chat to plan a project or a trip or do introductions, that needs to be laid to rest once that planning is over. Another don't is don't get all offended when people have a different texting style than you. I see this come up all the time. I write for an audience that's a little bit older and people get really ruffled when people don't use, for example, like proper capitalization, punctuation. No way. Revolution against punctuation. Yeah, apparently the younger generation, the Gen Zs and millennials

don't trust the punctuation mark period. Like, I don't know how to end this sentence. Is it a period. I feel like I don't know how to end this sentence. Is it a period? Is it an emoji? Or is it like, sometimes I'll just do like another exclamation point or like maybe I just leave it with no punctuation or no emoji. And then you can flip the script and you'll see younger folks getting frustrated and making fun of the way their boss is their relative's text when they're spelling things out using

ridiculous acronyms using the Gen Z, or sorry, the Gen X ellipsis where you're like not sure if they're mad at you because they are putting ellipses into text messages where they don't belong like every generation has its quirks with the way that it is typing out messages and I think we're past the point where we're gonna argue about like should we be spelling everything right you know should this be should this be formal should this be informal you have to let everyone live. Number three, you said you had three big ones. Ooh, okay, oh my gosh, I have so many don'ts.

I have more don'ts than I have dos, and I guess that's what etiquette is. If we all did everything right, we wouldn't need it. But don't be a wet blanket. Obviously texting is gonna be shorter, drier than sending a voice note, than having a phone call. But you wanna be matching people's energy, especially if you use texting to stay in touch, to share something about your life, if you're using it like a conversation.

Don't be that guy who's sending okay or thumbs up. Lots of people see the thumbs up emoji as being passive aggressive. Really? React to my messages like, you know what, I saw your message, but you're not even worth me typing out a f***ing word. It's like a stab in the abdomen to me. What the hell was that? Can I tell you about one of my pet peeves when it comes to this particular don't?

Yes. Is when you send someone you love something great you saw online, an article, a meme, a joke, a photo, and they go, seen it. online, an article, a meme, a joke, a photo, and they go, seen it. I'm like, if you saw it, then why didn't you send it to me? Or if you saw it, just like give me the reaction you had when you saw it.

Seen it is not useful to me. I don't care that you planted your flag on this meme before I did. Also, you were, the goal was a discussion. Like, imagine if you were with somebody and you were like, hey, you know, I just saw a news story about the, you know, about these high-level government people leaking their signal chat and someone was like, heard it.

Like, no, I get that, it's news, I wanna talk about it. I feel like memes are kind of the same. Yes and, yes and. We've done our rants. Should we talk about some do's or do you have some more don'ts you really wanna get off your chest? Oh man, oh man.

Okay, I have one more don't. I actually need to hate more than I thought I did, which is, no scary mysteries. Don't send a text like, don't send a text like, hey, can we talk? Oh, I hate that too, my parents do that. Oh, don't send a text. My mom does. Call me as soon as you can.

My mom? And it's like, I call her, it's like, hey, so do you want to eat tacos or? Literally. My mom, same. Where the urgency is just not matched to the content. Yeah. No scary mysteries allowed. You should say why you're reaching out.

Okay. We've done a lot of don'ts. Let's do a little do. Yes. Okay, one really nice thing to do when you're texting is to tell people what you want from them. Maybe one person wants to be in touch a lot and the other doesn't. Maybe one person wants to talk about more serious, heavy emotional stuff over the text and the other person is really uncomfortable with that.

But exactly like your in-person relationships, people can't read your mind and they, and you have to tell them what you want. So maybe that looks something like, I want to be in touch every day, I want to hear how your day was. Or hey, on weekdays, this is exhausting for me. Can we just like have a big old phone call on Saturdays? Whatever. You know what you're reminding me of is like the voice memos, or as I call them sometimes when I get them from Noelle King, my co-host, voice memoirs. Okay, I have started this message three times

and this is the fourth. Which, you know, can be really short and punchy and hilarious. I'm gonna vent for two minutes because I've been very positive lately and I feel like I have the right to complain to you for two minutes. In Noelle's case, I've never not loved one, but sometimes they're like eight minutes long,

not from Noelle but from other people, and you're just like, this is like work now. You just sent me a whole podcast I have to add to my queue. Like maybe we should establish at some point in the texting whether we want those or not, maybe? Absolutely. And again, just like any other thing in your friendships and relationships, it might require some compromise. So maybe for the person who's less texty, that means you're shooting an emoji, a thumbs up, a one-sentence thing

saying, saw it, care about you, I'll get back to this. Right? That's a nice compromise. Or maybe if you're the person who, you know, tends to get offended by this, you draw some boundary. You're like, hey, if you can't respond to me on time, maybe we should stick to phone calls. Right, like, it's not embarrassing, I think, to talk about your texting life as if it matters, because it does.

I like that, I like that. Be bold, okay. Any more do's that you really wanna, really want to share with the people out there? I would say, do like, stay grounded in reality. Remember the world we live in and remember that if you're in a, you know, encrypted signal chat, if you're in your private iMessage group with your best friends, that doesn't mean that you have carte blanche to say stuff that you would never want the world to see. We've seen again and again and again how screenshots of messages, it's not sacred, it can get out, it can get shared

with the person you're talking about. In this chat, there was a moment where JD Vance questioned POTUS's judgment about this hootie-bommick. Vance said the plan was a mistake and was inconsistent with Trump's message. There was some analysis and chattering after those screenshots leaked from the Signal Chat about how Vance had signaled

that he might have a different opinion than Trump on a matter of foreign policy. Now he has to show up to work and be like, hi, Donald. It's that Trump is a really bad candidate and frankly, I think a really bad person. So it's important to remember that nothing is private, nothing is sacred, once you have written it in a text.

And of course, we're going to see where, you know, the blowback for this group chat getting out ends up with someone losing their job, with a federal inquiry, who knows? What's clear is it won't soon be forgotten, and the amount of tension on group chats has led us all maybe to like think a little bit more about how we communicate with our friends, with our colleagues, with our family. Do you think it's for the best that we all had a moment to just reflect on the group chat? You know what?

There's an optimist inside of me who likes to believe that this will be good for society, that we're all reflecting on the group chat. However, now I've lived too long, right? So like, you know, Bezos' text leak, we're like, oh man, we'll never forget this. Biden leaves his Venmo public. Come on, man. Vance leaves his blog public.

And you know, we're finding, we're looking at Venmo transactions from Matt Gaetz. And most recently we saw that Mike Waltz of Signal Chat fame left his Venmo friends list public. It gets sucked in. And you know, people find it and they analyze it. And it happens again and again and again to politicians, to celebrities, to CEOs. So now I'm like starting to lose faith.

It's like how many high profile, embarrassing instances of our digital footprints getting out of our own control will it take before everybody pumps the brakes? Because it's a hard learned lesson to just kind of remember that digital stuff is forever, even in the safest of places. I have to say, in light of this week's news, Tatum, we are skipping a huge don't, which is don't add people to a group chat against their will. I need to add another bullet point to this guide and say don't add the editor in chief of the Atlantic to your, you know, the group chats where you're gossiping, because there

was some gossip happening. They were gossiping about Europe. They hate her. Hey, Hunter. You can read more do's and don'ts from her for you at WAPO.com. Abhishek Artsy and Gabrielle Burbae made our show today from California. Jolie Meyers edited Laura Bullard fact checked Andrea Kristen's daughter mixed it. You heard from Noel King earlier. The rest of us are Hattie Mawaddy, Amanda Llewellyn, Peter Balanon-Rosen, Victoria Chamberlain, Devin Schwartz, Patrick

Boyd, Carla Javier, Miles Bryant, and Travis Larchuk who's leaving us today but maybe he'll be back one day? What do you say Travis? Amina Alsati is our supervising editor, Miranda Kennedy is our executive producer, we use music by Breakmaster Sildner. This week we use some by Francesca Ramsey too. If you don't know Francesca you should. You can find her singing about leopards eating her face

on the Gram at Chesca Lee. That's L-E-I-G-H. Today Explain is distributed by WIC. The show is part of Vox. Support our journalism by joining our membership program today if you don't mind. Go to Vox.com slash members to sign up if you don't mind. And if you don't mind, we now have a Sunday show.

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