VIEWPOINT
Casual chat or formal note? Government by text is deeply flawed, says Helen Lewis
Barely a day passes without one of my friends giving me an update on some mundane horror that they’ve observed in a group chat. You know the kind of thing: Steve at Number 19 has found a dead fox in his garden and wants to know how to get rid of it. Rosie’s mum from the PTA WhatsApp is campaigning for the kids to have more homework, because her little darlings find it all too easy. Arun’s uncle keeps forwarding conspiracy theories about vaccines to the rest of the family. David from down the road has accidentally sexted the entire Neighbourhood Watch.
Instant messaging has reshaped our lives in all kinds of ways, simply because it’s so popular. WhatsApp has around 1.8 billion monthly active users on mobile devices alone; its wilder cousin Telegram, home to competing Russian and Ukrainian propaganda, claims 900 million. An average of 4.7 billion messages are sent each week on the workplace app Slack, making it a virtual replacement for the office watercooler.
What staggers me about these numbers is how little scrutiny these apps get, compared with public social media such as Facebook and TikTok. But look a little deeper into messaging apps and you’ll find remarkable personal stories and some of the biggest issues around – including the Government’s response to the Covid pandemic, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the wave of workplace rebellions that swept America in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
Instant messages promise us authentic, unfiltered insight into what people think. Sometimes that promise is fulfilled. You only have to read some of the excruciating WhatsApps that became public during the Covid Inquiry – or hear the pained excuses of those who wiped their histories – to realise that the public was never meant to get such an intimate glimpse behind the political scenes.
I talked to Dominic Cummings about his time in Number Ten, and whether instant messages should be treated as casual, private chats, or formal, official communications. He thinks the former but, at the moment, they are not quite either: hence why the Covid Inquiry is finding that so many chat threads have simply vanished.
And there are two other big pitfalls about Government by Text: the potential for hacks by foreign governments and for secret lobbying by business leaders. I find myself deeply ambiv
