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Today, Explained

Huge week for the group chat

28 Mar 2025

Description

This week offered some lessons on, among other things, how to text responsibly ๐Ÿ‘Š๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ๐Ÿ”ฅ This episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey and Avishay Artsy, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Further reading: Here Are the Attack Plans That Trumpโ€™s Advisers Shared on Signal, Texting do's and don'ts for 2024. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members ๏ปฟDemocratic Congressman Jared Moskowitz holds up a posterboard showing emojis used by President Trump's national security officials in the Houthi group text chat. Image courtesy of the office of Jared Moskowitz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcription

Full Episode

0.649 - 10.303 Sean Rameswaram

It's been a huge week for the group chat. Not one of yours, certainly not one of mine. I'm talking about the Houthi PC small group chat, of course.

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12.537 - 29.588 Unknown Speaker

But you've never talked to him before, so how's the number on your phone? I mean, I'm not an expert on any of this, but it's just curious. How's the number on your phone? Well, if you have somebody else's contact, and then somehow it gets sucked in. Oh, someone sent you that contact. It gets sucked in. Nobody's texting war plants. As a matter of fact, they even changed the Title II attack plans.

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29.909 - 40.576 Unknown Speaker

Now it turns out Judge Boasberg has actually been assigned to another high-profile case, this one surrounding the fallout from the signal messages in the Atlantic article, which we've been talking about all day, right?

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43.502 - 58.735 Sean Rameswaram

Never before has the group chat been subject to this kind of scrutiny, and it's been a great reminder that we have lost our way. On Today Explained, we're going to talk about texting and how we kind of forgot how to do it right. Or maybe we never knew how to do it right in the first place.

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60.72 - 82.056 Megan Rapinoe

Megan Rapinoe here. This week on A Touch More, we are launching our much-anticipated book club, and we're doing it with Abby Wambach and Glennon Doyle, who will introduce their upcoming book, We Can Do Hard Things, Answers to Life's 20 Questions. Plus, we've got some fun and important updates from The W and the NWSL, and of course, we've got a new Are You a Megan or Are You a Sue?

82.336 - 86.159 Megan Rapinoe

Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.

89.588 - 107.119 Sean Rameswaram

This is Today Explained. And this is Sean Ramos for him. Here with Max Reed of The Reed, Max Substack. Max has been thinking about group chats for years. In fact, he wrote a piece for New York Magazine way back in 2019 called Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again.

107.559 - 118.906 Sean Rameswaram

And since a certain group chat made the internet fun this week for at least some, we thought we'd ask Max, did we this week, at least in the United States, hit peak group chat?

119.713 - 139.171 Max Reid

Yeah, I mean, I have to say, you know, as a journalist and as somebody who writes about the future, making predictions, it felt extremely vindicating to go from a kind of trend piece about how me and a bunch of my friends seem to be turning to group chats to revelations that national security operations at the absolute highest and most top secret level were also being conducted on group chats.

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