“Please! Not another group chat”: inside WhatsApp’s slippery social politics

You can now make silent exits from Whatsapp groups

Credit: Molly Saunders

Relationships


“Please! Not another group chat”: inside WhatsApp’s slippery social politics

4 min read

WhatsApp has announced it will now allow users to make silent exits from chats they no longer want to be part of, but will that do anything to alleviate the app’s complicated social politics? Charlie Gowans-Eglinton investigates… 

I wonder if the first woman who opened a group chat with the sentence “hi girlies!” and three Flamenco dancing emojis in the subject line knew what she was starting. When I see those words, I know: this will be another WhatsApp group that intrudes into my evenings, that pings during meetings and on dates, that finally stops at 2am when the night owls go to bed – but then picks up again at 5am, when the larks wake up.

Since WhatsApp launched in 2009, it has grown from a simple messaging app to a social hub, a community centre, a workspace… and the scene of many a blinding row and sniping session. WhatsApp had 4.5 million users in 2014, when Facebook bought the company; as of 2022, that number has hit 2 billion. Which, coincidentally, is also the number of group chats that I’m in. Chats for hen dos, holidays, birthday parties, monthly dinners, nights out – some long since past, but the chats remain. Colleagues are arranged in tiers: the whole team; desk mates; the ones I gossip with. The same 20 friends repeat in infinite configurations: the whole group; the ones who live locally; the ones who are single; the ones who like live music, or wild swimming, or pottery, or wine bars. I imagine there are just as many configurations without me, and I don’t mind in the slightest – if anything, I’m thrilled not to be invited to events I can’t afford or won’t like, to be the single elephant in the room on new-mum chats or amidst plans for couples’ dinner parties.

What started as a free way to message friends has snowballed into one of our most-used apps, with its own fraught politics and pitfalls. Not least being: is there any way off the treadmill? As of last week, the answer is, well, maybe. The app announced it will now allow users to bow out of groups silently without notifying other members – to sneak out, essentially, and never have to hear from that group again. But at what price is this freedom? 

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