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Donald Trump’s national security adviser used one emoji of a clenched fist, another of an American flag and another of a blaze of fire.
Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine negotiator chose two American flags, two praying hands and a flexed bicep.
Other top Trump officials went for double exclamation marks and capital letters in messages about military attack plans that they sent on a Signal group chat that mistakenly included a journalist.
These are by no means the most jaw-dropping revelations in the Signalgate drama that exploded all over the Trump administration this week.
But they do say a lot about the irksome blurring of work and play on the chat apps that have come to dominate so much of daily life.
To start with, the blurring means work has crept into after-hours downtime in a way it never did before.
Not that long ago, we used one set of tools to send work messages and another set for friends, family, the next-door neighbour, Wordle groups, and others outside the office.
The work messages went on office emails or apps such as Slack, and they generally did not contain exclamation points, nor capital letters, and certainly not emojis.
Those things went in messages to people in one’s non-work world, on different platforms like Facebook Messenger or increasingly WhatsApp, the world’s most popular messaging app.
You could leave these apps to ping away all weekend, knowing the pingers were unlikely to be asking anything more taxing than what time to meet for coffee or whether there was milk in the fridge.
Those days are gone. Some time before Covid, office colleagues and work contacts began to send messages over apps once confined to social life.
The trend accelerated in the chaotic early months of the pandemic as lockdowns fuelled a massive rise in the use of WhatsApp, which is owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
In March and April 2020, WhatsApp messages nearly doubled from what they were a year earlier, one study of more than 25mn messages from almost 52,000 users showed. In hotspots such as Spain, the amount of time spent on the app surged as much as 76 per cent, other researchers found.
In my experience, the pandemic also bred new levels of informality at work that meant I was suddenly WhatsApping people I would only ever have contacted by email or phone texts before.
Work colleagues. Contacts. Random executives I had only just “met” on Zoom. All were fair game.
When I look back over my chat history, I can see that at some point it no longer seemed wrong to WhatsApp one’s manager, and then add a thumbs up emoji.
This seemed entirely sensible at this strange, disconnected time.
A few years on though, it also feels as if a dividing line between work and social life has been breached.
A weekend WhatsApp ping might be the babysitter checking to see what time you’ll be home, which is why you can never afford to ignore the app. But disturbingly, it could also be the boss asking if you can come in early on Monday for a chat.
There have of course been far more serious consequences of the WhatsAppification of work.
Politicians have landed in hot water after using platforms that make messages hard to retrieve, unlike official channels that retain communication so they can be checked if wrongdoing is suspected.
Banks in the US have faced more than $2.5bn of fines since 2021 over such “off-channel” communications, and some now block WhatsApp on company phones.
Finally, the nature of WhatsApp itself has complicated its use in the workplace. It now has WhatsApp Business for companies and, like Signal, allows hundreds of people to join its chat groups. That can pose problems if used by, say, a big business team. How do you keep tabs on who is still employed and who has quit but might still have access to sensitive data?
Also, the bigger the group, surely the harder it is to make sure that everyone in it is supposed to be there. Or so we thought until this week.
The group at the centre of the Signalgate storm had just 19 members. They included vice-president, JD Vance, defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, and, in a development nobody could have predicted, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic magazine.
pilita.clark@ft.com
