Its been a big week for the group chat. On Monday, the Atlantics editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg published a story revealing that National Security Advisor Michael Waltz accidentally added him to a Signal thread where top Trump cabinet members were discussing upcoming military strikes in Yemen. First, the Trump administration denied that top Trump officials shared war plans in the chat. Then, on Wednesday, the Atlantic published more screenshots of the conversation titled Houthi PC small group in which US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth detailed the precise timing and coordination of American fighter jet take-offs for the strike. Now, a federal watchdog group is suing members of the administration in the group chat for violating the Federal Records Act. Messier still, the federal judge overseeing the lawsuit is already a Trump administration enemy, thanks to his ruling that they must stop deporting some Venezuelan migrants. The whole security breach has thrown the White House into a state of simultaneous denial and disarray. As the fallout from the now-infamous Signal chat continues to unfold, Sean Rameswaram sought a different type of lesson from this weeks news: a lesson on texting. For Today, Explained, co-host Rameswaram spoke with Washington Post internet culture reporter Tatum Hunter about the dos and donts of texting in the modern age, and the messaging etiquette lessons we could all learn from the Signal group chat fiasco. Click the link below to hear the whole conversation. The following is a transcript edited for length and clarity.Tatum, you are brave enough to tell people how to text?Well, I think that our lives play out increasingly online. Today when you say something like internet culture, thats just culture a lot of the time, right? You talk about texting etiquette like, yeah, thats just how we communicate. The internet trickles down into our lives and changes our relationships, and this is contentious for people. Should we start with the dos or should we start with the donts?Lets start with the donts because I think thats spicier.Okay, great. For the haters, well start with the donts. Three big donts. One dont is: Dont use group texts for something that they werent created for.Everybody has that group text from a bachelorette party in like, 2018 that people will still pop into to share photos of their kids. Those have to die once youre done with the reason that you created them. If you have a group chat with your parents because youre related, that can keep going forever, because youll always be related. But if you have a group chat to plan a project or a trip or do introductions, that needs to be laid to rest once that planning is over. Another dont is: Dont get all offended when people have a different texting style than you. OhI see this come up all the time. I write for an audience thats a little bit older and people get really ruffled when others dont use, for example, proper capitalization, punctuation. And then you can flip the script and youll see younger folks getting frustrated and making fun of the way their bosses or relatives text when theyre spelling things out, using ridiculous acronyms, using the Gen X ellipsis, where youre like not sure if theyre mad at you because theyre putting ellipses into text messages where they dont belong. Every generation has its quirks with the way that it is typing out messages. And I think were past the point where were going to argue about, Should we be spelling everything right? Should this be formal? Should this be informal? You have to let everyone live.Number three? You said you had three big ones.Oh my gosh, I have so many donts. I have more donts than I have dos. I guess thats what etiquette is. If we all did everything right, we wouldnt need it. But: Dont be a wet blanket. Obviously, texting is going to be shorter, drier than sending a voice note, than having a phone call. But you want to be matching peoples energy, especially if you use texting to stay in touch. Dont be that guy whos sending okay, or thumbs up.Can I tell you about one of my pet peeves when it comes to this particular dont?Yes!When you send someone you love something great you saw online an article, a meme, a joke, a photo, and they go: seen it. Im like, if you saw it, then why didnt you send it to me? Or if you saw it, just gimme the reaction you had when you saw it. Seen it is not useful to me. I dont care that you planted your flag on this meme before I did.Also, the goal was a discussion. Imagine if you were with somebody and you were like, Hey, I just saw a news story about these high-level government people leaking their Signal chat and someone was like, Heard it. Like, No, I get that, its news. I wanna talk about it. Memes are kind of the same.Yes and, yes and. Okay, I have one more dont: No scary mysteries. Dont send a text, like, Hey, can we talk?Oh, I hate that too. My parents do that. Call me as soon as you can. And I call and its like, Hey, so do you want to eat tacos orWhere the urgency is just not matched to the content. You should say why youre reaching out.Okay, weve done a lot of dont. Lets do a little do.One really nice thing to do when youre texting is to tell people what you want from them. Maybe one person wants to be in touch a lot and the other doesnt. Maybe one person wants to talk about more serious, heavy emotional stuff over text, and the other persons really uncomfortable with that. But exactly like your in-person relationships, people cant read your mind. You have to tell them what you want. You know, what youre reminding me of is the voice memos, or as I call them sometimes, voice memoirs. They can be really short and punchy and hilarious... But sometimes theyre like eight minutes long. And youre just like, this is like work now. You just sent me a whole podcast I have to add to my queue. Maybe we should establish at some point in the texting whether we want those or not, maybe?Absolutely. And again, just like any other thing in your friendships and relationships, it might require some compromise. So maybe for the person whos less texty, that means youre shooting an emoji, a thumbs up, a one-sentence thing saying, saw it, care about you, Ill get back to this. Right? Thats a nice compromise. Or maybe if youre the person who you know tends to get offended by this, you draw some boundary, like, Hey, if you cant respond to me on time, maybe we should stick to phone calls. Right? Its not embarrassing, I think, to talk about your texting life as if it matters, because it does!I like that. Be bold. Okay, any more dos that you really want to share with the people out there?Do stay grounded in reality. Remember the world we live in, and remember that if youre in, you know, an encrypted Signal chat or if youre in your private iMessage group with your best friends that doesnt mean that you have carte blanche to say stuff that you would never want the world to see. Mm.Weve seen again and again and again how screenshots of messages its not sacred. It can get out.There was some analysis and chattering after those screenshots leaked from the Signal chat about, you know, how Vance had signaled that he might have a different opinion than Trump on a matter of foreign policy. Now he has to show up to work and be like, Hi Donald. So its important to remember that nothing is private, nothing is sacred once you have written it in a text.Were going to see where the blowback for this group chat getting out ends up, with someone losing their job, with a federal inquiry, who knows. Whats clear is it wont soon be forgotten. Do you think its for the best that we all had a moment to just reflect on the group chat?Theres an optimist inside of me who likes to believe that this will be good for society, that were all reflecting on the group chat. However, now Ive lived too long, right? So, Bezoss text leak were like, oh man, well never forget this. Biden leaves his Venmo public. Vance leaves his blog public. Venmo transactions from Matt Gaetz. Most recently we saw that Mike Waltz of Signal Chat fame left his Venmo friends list public. People find it and they analyze it. And it happens again and again and again to politicians, to celebrities, to CEOs. So now Im starting to lose faith. How many high-profile embarrassing instances of our digital footprints getting out of our own control will it take before everybody pumps the brakes? Because its a hard-learned lesson to just kind of remember that digital stuff is forever, even in the safest of places.I have to say in light of this weeks news, Tatum, we are skipping a huge dont, which is: Dont add people to a group chat against their will.(Laughs] I need to add another bullet point to this guide and say, dont add the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic.See More: