It’s been a big week for the group chat.
On Monday, the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg published a story revealing that National Security Advisor Michael Waltz accidentally added him to a Signal thread where top Trump cabinet members were discussing upcoming military strikes in Yemen.
First, the Trump administration denied that top Trump officials shared “war plans” in the chat. Then, on Wednesday, the Atlantic published more screenshots of the conversation – titled “Houthi PC small group” – in which US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth detailed the precise timing and coordination of American fighter jet take-offs for the strike.
Now, a federal watchdog group is suing members of the administration in the group chat for violating the Federal Records Act. Messier still, the federal judge overseeing the lawsuit is already a Trump administration enemy, thanks to his ruling that they must stop deporting some Venezuelan migrants. The whole security breach has thrown the White House into a state of simultaneous denial and disarray.
As the fallout from the now-infamous Signal chat continues to unfold, Sean Rameswaram sought a different type of lesson from this week’s news: a lesson on texting. For Today, Explained, co-host Rameswaram spoke with Washington Post internet culture reporter Tatum Hunter about the do’s and don’ts of texting in the modern age, and the messaging etiquette lessons we could all learn from the Signal group chat fiasco.
Click the link below to hear the whole conversation. The following is a transcript edited for length and clarity.
Tatum, 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. The internet trickles down into our lives and changes our relationships, and this is contentious for people.
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.
Okay, great. For the haters, we’ll start with the don’ts.
Three big don’ts. One don’t is: Don’t use group texts for something that they weren’t created for.
Everybody has that group text from a bachelorette party in like, 2018 that people will still pop into to share photos of their kids. Those have to die once you’re done with the reason that you created them.
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 others don’t use, for example, proper capitalization, punctuation.
And then you can flip the script and you’ll see younger folks getting frustrated and making fun of the way their bosses or relatives text — when they’re spelling things out, using ridiculous acronyms, using the Gen X ellipsis, where you’re… like… not sure if they’re mad at you… because they’re putting ellipses into text messages where they don’t belong.
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 going to argue about, “Should we be spelling everything right? Should this be formal? Should this be informal?” You have to let everyone live.
Number three? You said you had three big ones.
Oh my gosh, I have so many don’ts. I have more don’ts than I have do’s. 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 going to be shorter, drier than sending a voice note, than having a phone call. But you want to be matching people’s energy, especially if you use texting to stay in touch. Don’t be that guy who’s sending “okay,” or “thumbs up.”
Can I tell you about one of my pet peeves when it comes to this particular don’t?
Yes!
When you send someone you love something great you saw 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 gimme 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, the goal was a discussion. Imagine if you were with somebody and you were like, “Hey, I just saw a news story 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.” Memes are kind of the same.
Okay, I have one more don’t: No scary mysteries. Don’t send a text, like, “Hey, can we talk?”
Oh, I hate that too. My parents do that. “ Call me as soon as you can.” And I call and it’s like, “Hey, so do you want to eat tacos or…”
Where the urgency is just not matched to the content. You should say why you’re reaching out.
Okay, we’ve done a lot of don’t. Let’s do a little do.
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 text, and the other person’s really uncomfortable with that. But exactly like your in-person relationships, people can’t read your mind. You have to tell them what you want.
You know, what you’re reminding me of is the voice memos, or as I call them sometimes, “voice memoirs.” They can be really short and punchy and hilarious… But sometimes they’re like eight minutes long. And you’re just like, this is like work now. You just sent me a whole podcast I have to add to my queue. 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, like, “Hey, if you can’t respond to me on time, maybe we should stick to phone calls.” Right? It’s not embarrassing, I think, to talk about your texting life as if it matters, because it does!
I like that. Be bold. Okay, any more do’s that you really want to share with the people out there?
Do stay grounded in reality. Remember the world we live in, and remember that if you’re in, you know, an encrypted Signal chat — or 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.
There was some analysis and chattering after those screenshots leaked from the Signal chat about, you know, 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.”
So it’s important to remember that nothing is private, nothing is sacred once you have written it in a text.
We’re going to see where 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. Do you think it’s for the best that we all had a moment to just reflect on the group chat?
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, Bezos’s text leak — we’re like, oh man, we’ll never forget this. Biden leaves his Venmo public. Vance leaves his blog public. Venmo transactions from Matt Gaetz. Most recently we saw that Mike Waltz of Signal Chat fame left his Venmo friends list public. 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 starting to lose faith. 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.
(Laughs] I need to add another bullet point to this guide and say, don’t add the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic.
