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

Written by Charlie Gowans-Eglinton

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? 

I doubt you could get away with it on the family group chat, much as you might want to. One friend’s mother-in-law uses theirs as her personal notepad. “She fills it with random names of things or places she wanted to jot down,” my friend explained. “So you’d just get ‘Langston Cliffs Walking Trail’ because she was having a coffee with someone who’d mentioned it, so she could come back to it later.” She also uses the group rather than messaging anyone directly, even if their conversation is irrelevant to everyone else.

My 70-year-old father, meanwhile, a long-time pocket-dialler, often sends WhatsApps to whichever chat is at the top of his most recently used list – this month, it was the lucky booking agent of a holiday house who got to hear his news. 

So how can you silence the noise if you don’t want these constant updates? There’s always muting. A few weeks ago, I told ‘France 2022’ that I was muting them (the indefinite mute feature was launched in 2020). I was rushing to meet a work deadline, and they were blowing up my phone with airbnbs in the Dordogne, links to the best vide greniers, and discussion over whether we could manage with just one bathtub and no indoor shower between six adults and two children, if that meant a week in a rustic chateau. Once I was off mute, I clarified that no, we absolutely could not. “Charlie is reading us the bad reviews on speaker phone,” my friend messaged the group. “She has an issue with the toilet door not closing *eye roll emoji*.” After lots of crying-laughing emojis (still a favourite with these millennials, despite Gen Z thinking it’s uncool), there was more pinging of airbnb links until we found a house with 3.5 bathrooms and a bakery within walking distance.

But not all groups would take muting well (let alone dissent from the majority’s opinion). It depends on the stakes, and the players. Muting a group holiday is one thing; muting a bride, or her ‘bride squad’, is quite another.

One wedding that I went to had a group chat for those staying in the hotel, another for the sten (stag/hen) night out, another planning a video surprise for the bride and groom, and for the main hen do, “I think just bridesmaids for now, and then when we have a plan we can do another group”. The latter was set up a full calendar year before the wedding, with “hi girlies” popping up on my phone weekly, followed by prompts to buy the bride a pair of knickers that summed up our friendship, or send a picture of the man I lost my virginity to (so she could guess them in a line up), or choose between white or pink for the tiny Bride Squad swimsuit I was expected to wear – this last request sparked one of my very few contributions during the whole year: another polite, but firm, no. 

After the wedding chats, inevitably come the baby ones. A friend having her first child recently joined a local NCT WhatsApp, and found it was less social space, more extension of Mumsnet – there were a few useful recommendations and offers of second-hand clothing, but far more unsolicited statistics and general shaming over breast-over bottle-feeding. But opting out isn’t always straightforward. When one woman tried to set up a walk in the local park, another left the group abruptly, turning the already-frosty conversation glacial.

Perhaps she was just busy, or overwhelmed. Perhaps she just lived too far away from that park. For those left in the group, it felt pointed, even mean. Conversation dwindled, as though that departure meant the group wasn’t worth investing in. Without real-life context, cues from body language or tone, it’s so easy to misconstrue things online, and read into things too much.

“Some people report that they find groups impossible, and that it is almost a nightmare to keep up with those that they have automatically been included in,” says psychotherapist and counsellor Samantha Tipples. “But they find it embarrassing and almost shameful to try to leave.”  

This, Tipples explains, is because people often need affirmation and reassurance about how they are perceived. “Leaving a group can be seen as rude or strange and taken extremely personally. If they do leave, there may be exclusion from further groups – some have reported that they are never invited again,” she says. “The idea of missing out on what might happen has happened or will happen, for some, is simply too much to bear.”

WhatsApp use increased during the pandemic, during lockdowns and when we were all working from home. It provided connection that we were sorely lacking, but that’s also when it started to feel like a full time job in itself. Conversations could no longer be had across the desk, and sometimes emailing isn’t instant enough. There’s Slack, but that’s just one more app – so we ended up with another group chat instead. I don’t actually mind the QWW (quick work WhatsApp), the ‘I’ve sent you an email, need your reply by 4pm’ stuff. I actually welcome it – it means that I don’t miss the important things, and nor do I have to check my email inbox every five minutes. But turn it into a group and the parameters spread. Messages that could’ve been sent to one person are sent to all 30 instead; “@Jess, can you update the spreadsheet to include next week?” Then comes the work-adjacent… “train strike!” “the air con isn’t working, BYO Calippos! *Melty face emoji*”. Next you’re getting updates on the cafeteria’s lunch menu, and before you know it, you have a CWW (chatty work WhatsApp) with 40 definitely-not-need-to-know pings a day. “Who’s watching Strictly?” “Just saw Duncan from Blue at Bristol airport!” “Guys, who wants to do an office Bake Off this year?”

If you miss nipping off to the tea-point to moan about a colleague, there’s a WhatsApp group for that, too. Take the time one female friend of mine filed a report on an ongoing work project that suggested an amendment, based on her extensive experience in the area. A male colleague posted her entire report, along with the comment “who does she think she is,” to a WhatsApp group – which she was also a member of. She replied, and he fell silent – but hasn’t apologised, and since it was said on WhatsApp rather than in the office or on an official channel, she hasn’t pursued it.

A freelance friend, meanwhile, privately quoted his fee for a job, only for the woman who’d asked for it to share it on a public WhatsApp group of industry contacts, asking if anyone would undercut it. He was a member of that group, too, and called her out for unprofessionalism.

It might not be the boring stuff of board meetings (especially if you’re watching this drama as a fly on the work-WhatsApp wall) but having your company chat constantly popping up means having thoughts about work constantly popping up, when you should be switched off from it. You (hopefully) wouldn’t check your work emails at 10pm on a Sunday, but most of us have WhatsApp set to flash up on our lockscreens – so little work niggles are suddenly reaching us in the middle of dinner, or a long bath. And you can’t mute your work chat, because for every 39 irrelevant messages, there’s one from your boss that you actually need to read and reply to.

“The expectation that someone will reply instantly and is always on demand as well as being able to see if someone has read a message but not replied can be very anxiety-inducing,” says says Lucy Clyde, psychotherapist, counsellor and co-host of the How To Cope podcast.

“This is partly because we are all social animals and tend to care a great deal about what our peers and loved ones think of us. Platforms such as WhatsApp set some fairly unrealistic expectations around communication which can make it very hard to maintain healthy boundaries. If we have nothing to contribute to a chat, or don’t want to reply but others are firing off witticisms, then that can leave us feeling inadequate, left out and subsequently anxious.”

Sometimes, though, leaving a group can signify bigger life changes. After a friend’s ex ended their long-term relationship, WhatsApps became just another thing to divvy up, along with the crockery and the cookbooks. She removed herself from any group chat that they had in common – eight in total. One was a group chat she’d created to plan his surprise birthday party. One of their mutual friends used another chat, a skiing group of 20, most of whom were his university friends before they started dating, to take sides. “When we broke up, one of the guys removed him from the group.”

WhatsApp’s new stealthy exits will mean that leaving reads less like a mic drop. But you might feel more FOMO than if you mute them, and the admin will still know you’ve left. I think, then, the solution isn’t being able to leave groups quietly, but feeling able not to join them in the first place. No one would think it was strange if you turned down a dinner invitation because you already had plans, so perhaps we should treat invitations to new group chats the same way. I’m fully booked at the moment, but thanks so much for thinking of me…

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