Group chats rule the world

How many group chats are you involved in? For me, it varies. Right now, there are only two — and both are of a more private nature.

Group chats are something that’s not really discussed much; they represent a newer technical form of communication that perhaps is better understood as a way of organizing oneself socially. As such, it has emerged sort of organically.

It has never been a “trend” to start group chats and there is really no major innovation behind it. Despite that, almost everyone now participates in various forms of group chats. It can be with family or friends, for parents in a school class, the football team, different groups or project teams at work, and so on. The simplicity of setting them up and the immediacy of communication has allowed group chat to impact our society at all levels.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but it was, of course, brought to the fore by the news this week in the US of the “Signal Chat”, where Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, was accidentally invited to a Trump administration war chat. Goldberg suddenly found himself in a group chat with the US Secretary of Defense, the Vice President, the National Security Advisor, the head of the CIA and a number of others; the purpose of the group was to plan bombings of Houthi rebels in Yemen.

That a group chat, even on a secure service like Signal, was used for this purpose — and that a journalist happened to be invited to it — became a major scandal that has put some unusual pressure on the Trump administration.

But this is far from the first time a group chat has taken the form of a corridor of power. Remember the UK government’s Whatsapp groups during the COVID-19 pandemic? They came under intense scrutiny when the handling of the pandemic was later investigated. And in Sweden, there is the “Gingänget” in Alingsås, where top political parties vied for power in a secret group chat that was revealed by the Göteborgs-Posten newspaper, resulting in resignations.

Outside the world of politics, another example involved the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank two years ago. It turned out that the bank run was fueled by large group chats for startup entrepreneurs where panic started to spread and everyone suddenly withdrew their money at the same time.

Over the years, it has also been revealed several times that Swedish police officers have communicated in group chats on Whatsapp and just the other week Dagens Nyheter reported that there is apparently a group chat for Swedish billionaires used to share private flights with each other.

As I said, group chats are not a new phenomenon and similar ways of communicating digitally have been around since the internet went mainstream. For a while, mailing lists were popular and more tech-savvy people had chats on IRC. But since Slack, Teams, Whatsapp, Messenger and Signal made group chats more accessible, their use has become a real grassroots movement, organizing everything from everyday tasks to world politics.

Is this a problem? Yes, sometimes it is. The exercise of power without transparency is always problematic, and there’s a reason why democratic countries have laws requiring that important communications be documented and preserved. The latest “Signal Chat” is probably illegal for several reasons, at least on paper, and it would be in Sweden, too.

At the same time, it should be remembered that it is not the group chat technology itself that is the culprit here. Technology has just made it much easier to achieve what used to be done in other forums. In the same way that group chats between classmates have replaced phone chains, chatting with those in power is essentially a modern version of the old gentlemen’s clubs — now in your pocket. And technology or not, it is still possible for people in power to meet over lunch without any transparency.

However, group chat as a phenomenon remains interesting and I think that when future sociologists study how society and people’s social interaction and decision-making changed with digitalization, group chats will actually play a central role.

This column is taken from CS Weekly, a personalized newsletter with reading tips, link tips and analysis sent directly from the desk of Editor-in-Chief Marcus Jerräng. Would you like to receive the newsletter on Fridays? Sign up for a free subscription here.