Mind your Ps and Qs and who’s who in group chats

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/03/2025 (529 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Earlier this week, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, made the incendiary revelation that the Trump administration accidentally texted him its war plans.

Goldberg was mistakenly included in a group chat (a group chat!) among U.S. national-security leaders discussing upcoming military strikes in Yemen. Obviously, Goldberg wasn’t supposed to see … any of that.

How does something like this even happen? Great question. Why does this group chat even exist? Also a great question.

Now, no government officials have ever texted me their war plans, but I do know a thing or two about group chats.

In the spirit of learning from others’ horrifyingly reckless mistakes and applying some take-home lessons to our own lives, let’s review some basic group-chat ground rules.

You should know who is in your group chat. This one seems like it should be pretty obvious but apparently it’s not. Top tip: know who is in your group chat. If you don’t know who is in your group chat, how can you be confident that what’s mentioned in the group chat will stay in the group chat?

Remember that different group chats serve different purposes. You might have multiple group chats representing different spheres of your life — colleagues, friends from college, parents from your kid’s school, family, book club, that one cursed chat that’s always muted — and some of these chats might be large and unwieldy.

For the sharing of high-level information — which, for regular people, means hot goss — the group chat should be small, ideally no more than four participants. To be clear, I don’t think anyone should be texting things such as war plans to anyone ever, but having 18 (!) people in a group-chat about bombing Houthi targets in Yemen, for a completely random example, is absolutely wild.

Be careful when sharing sensitive information. We all possess and handle sensitive information all day long. Sure, your sensitive information may not be a powerful nation’s full-on war plans, but it might be petty screenshots of an infuriating text thread from another group chat, or deep-in-the-creep recon about your best friend’s ex-husband’s new girlfriend.

Listen: classified info is classified info. Handle with care and utmost discretion, cut and paste with exacting precision.

Consider your use of emojis and what you are trying to convey. Whether you need to react to messages quickly or just passively acknowledge them, emojis can be useful in keeping the group chat rolling (laughing face, melting face, eye-roll face, crying face or the heart — but use with caution). But sometimes, they can be wildly inappropriate.

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Again, just spitballin’ here, but maybe using the fist bump, American flag and fire emojis — or two prayer hands, a flexed bicep and two American flags — are not cool when talking about war?

We should all probably say way less in the group chat. THINK is an acronym you may have come across online encouraging people to be more thoughtful about what they post to social media by taking a quick sec to consider whether or not it’s True, Helpful, Inspiring (I would also accept Incriminating), Necessary or Kind.

It’s trite, maybe, but it’s also not wrong — especially if you value your reputation, credibility and relationships. Before participating in a group chat at all, it’s worth thinking about what you are actually contributing or — and this is key — if what’s being discussed is even group-chat material at all.

I also think it’s healthy to live with a mild fear of screenshots. After all, you just never know what might end up in a national publication.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com

Jen Zoratti
Columnist

Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen.

Every piece of reporting Jen produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print – part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.