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Donald Trump’s national security adviser used the clenched fist emoji, another American flag and another flame of fire.
Trump’s Middle Eastern and Ukrainian negotiators chose two American flags, two prayer hands and a bent humerus.
Other Trump officials sought double exclamation points and capital letters in messages about the military attack plan that they mistakenly sent to a signal group chat with journalists.
These are not the most surprising revelations of the Signalgate drama that exploded throughout the Trump administration this week.
But they have said a lot about the nasty blur of work and play on chat apps that have come to dominate much of their daily lives.
To begin with, the blurry method sneaked into downtime outside business hours in a way that never happened before.
For so long ago, we used one tool set to send work messages and another set for friends, family, neighbors, Wordle groups, and more.
Work messages were posted in office emails and apps such as Slack and usually included no exclamation marks, capital letters or emojis.
These have sent messages to people in their non-working worlds on a variety of platforms, including Facebook Messenger, the world’s most popular messaging app, and increasingly WhatsApp.
These apps can be heard throughout the weekend. I know that Pinger rarely asks for more tax than time to meet coffee or whether there was milk in the fridge.
Those days are gone. Shortly before Covid, office colleagues and work contacts began sending messages to apps once confined to social life.
This trend accelerated in the early months of the pandemic as lockdowns helped drive a significant increase in the use of WhatsApp, owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
In March and April 2020, WhatsApp messages almost doubled from a year ago. One study on messages of over 25 million from nearly 52,000 users shows. Other researchers found that in hotspots such as Spain, time spent on apps has skyrocketed by 76%.
In my experience, the pandemic has brought a new level of informality in the workplace. This meant I was someone I had suddenly only contacted by email or phone text.
Working colleagues. contact address. The only random executives were “meeting” on Zoom. Everything was a fair game.
Looking back at the history of the chat, you can see that at one point it doesn’t seem wrong for the manager of WhatsApp One, and added it by raising the emoji.
This seemed totally wise at this strange and disconnected time.
But a few years later, it feels as if the line between work and social life is being violated.
weekend whatsapp ping may be a babysitter check to see how long you are at home. So you can’t afford to ignore the app. But in a disturbing way, it could also be the boss who asks if he can come for chat early on Monday.
Of course, there are far more serious consequences to whatsappification of work.
Unlike official channels that maintain communication, politicians landed in hot water after using platforms that make messaging difficult to make sure that fraud was suspected.
US banks have faced more than $2.5 billion fines over such “off-channel” communications since 2021, and are now blocking WhatsApp on company mobile phones.
Finally, the nature of WhatsApp itself complicates its use in the workplace. We currently have a WhatsApp business aimed at businesses, allowing hundreds of people to join chat groups, just like signalling. For example, when used with a large corporate team, it can cause problems. How do you monitor who is still employed and who is leaving, but still has access to sensitive data?
And the bigger the group, the more difficult it is certainly to make sure everyone in it should be there. Or I thought about it until this week.
The group at the heart of SignalGate Storm had only 19 members. To them, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of Atlantic Magazine, was a no-one who could have predicted Vice President, J.D. Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegses, and development.
pilita.clark@ft.com
