Introduction
In this article I will venture onto the slippery ground of how people use messaging apps in today's society. Computing is not only a science; it also has a major political dimension: deciding how technological tools should work. When those tools belong to multinational platforms, the policies set by their makers have substantial social effects that we ordinary citizens are often unaware of. I want to shine a light on messaging, raise awareness, and help make it a tool that improves our lives, so that we use it well and avoid suffering its potential harms, especially among younger generations.
One of the threads running through this article is the central argument of Marshall McLuhan's 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. It devotes an entire chapter to telephone calls but says nothing about chats, simply because chats did not yet exist. The book's famous thesis is that “the medium is the message”: to put it in an ungenerous, crude nutshell, a medium of communication has a considerable influence on the message, so much so that at times it becomes the message itself. The thesis applies just as well to messaging. I will try to show how these tools can distort what we say and change our lives, especially when used inappropriately.
Before getting into practical details, I will review the main forms of direct digital communication and then set out a kind of etiquette for conversations. This will let me examine two familiar cases: parents' school group chats and, a much more delicate matter, the effect these tools have on our children's lives and safety.
Chapter 1 — Direct communication
To make sense of the technical and social objections I will raise in the next section, I will first lay out the main features of the direct communication tools most widely used today. By direct communication I mean any tool that connects one or more specific senders with one or more specific recipients, without an intermediary.
Calls
Since smartphones became widespread, calls—both voice and video—have become less important as a means of communication and are now mostly reserved for emergencies, particularly complex conversations, and intimate chats. Calls are the fastest way to communicate, but also the most intrusive, unless the phone is kept on silent, which is not always appropriate.
A voice call is an almost complete communication system: it can be fairly clear and effective, and is not easily misunderstood. It cannot convey non-verbal cues such as gestures, facial expressions, or nervous tics, but it does convey tone and manner, and sometimes even the speaker's state of mind.
With a video call, the other person can also see something of your living environment. This comes at the cost of being even more intrusive than an ordinary phone call, but body language makes communication almost complete, apart from anything outside the frame or hidden by poor lighting. In good conditions, it is hard for either person to miss much, unless someone is inherently unable to communicate or deliberately withholds information.
Email is the electronic counterpart of a letter sent through the postal service. It is the least intrusive medium of all and was designed to be entirely asynchronous. Yet among the tools that use writing and images, it is the most dignified and complete. Asynchronous means that, unlike a call, where people speak and listen in real time, an email may be read—if it is read at all—at some indefinite point in the future. The same goes for a reply: if the recipient responds, they may do so at any time.
Despite its apparent obsolescence, email is precious in today's hyperconnected world. One reason is that both formal and informal emails require the sender to shape their thoughts: to give them an opening, a body, and a conclusion; to make the reasoning coherent and logical, complete, well organised, and clear. Writing letters and emails keeps important cognitive skills sharp and exercises critical thinking.
Like all text-based media, however, email is not a complete communication system. Unless we describe everything in exhaustive detail, it does not convey our state of mind, our emotions, or, more simply, our tone. The same sentence can be sarcastic or literal depending on the speaker's tone of voice, but text has no voice. We need to build the right context around the words to avoid ambiguity, and that is not easy. This disadvantage is also an incentive to practise communicating carefully and appropriately.
Chats
Messaging is the medium that has changed most over time: its technical capabilities have improved, while social habits have worsened. Early chat services lived on desktop computers. To use them, you had to log in, and when you were finished, you had to leave; you were not constantly reachable. They were mostly tied to socialising, much like going to a pub, a town square, or a club: you used them during a particular part of the day, with no way to send someone a message for them to read later or catch up on a conversation you had missed.
Leaving voice messages aside for the moment, the main feature that chats have retained from their beginnings is that they are an imperfect hybrid of email and a phone call. From email they take their written form, so they cannot convey vocal tone and can be ambiguous. This happens even more readily than with email because people pay less attention to how they phrase a chat message, writing with the same spontaneity as they speak on the phone. Chats sometimes resemble calls in their timing, too: when both people are taking part at the same time, messages go back and forth continuously.
The real evolution of chat has been in the way we use it. Since smartphones began travelling everywhere with us, chat has always been on. It has borrowed some of the intrusiveness of phone calls and some of the flexibility of email. A new communication pact has emerged, halfway between the two: the recipient accepts being “disturbed” by short notifications, which are less intrusive and demanding than a ringing phone; the sender accepts that the recipient may not read or answer right away—or at all. Chat has therefore changed from a social club that we chose when to enter, carving out a bounded part of our day in which to participate or simply observe, into a kind of virtual town square: often noisy, without boundaries, and part of everyday social life, though each person approaches it differently.
Muting notifications—the equivalent of silencing the ringer on a phone—is not an ethically disastrous remedy for some of chat's excesses. The pact already allows for the possibility that a message may not be read immediately, or may never be read. Muting a chat is therefore not a great offence. There is a trade-off, though: we lose the chance to get the best out of chat, both as senders and as recipients. As senders, we may lose confidence in using the medium with people who never reply or are always late to do so. As recipients, if we never reply, at best we risk building up a large backlog and missing what matters; at worst we may be bombarded with calls when a simple “OK” or “no” would have been enough.
Given how intrusive chats have become, I believe the most ethical approach is to learn how to use them properly. The medium is still the message, as McLuhan taught us: those who use a medium badly rarely send a constructive or useful message through it. A few simple habits, on the other hand, can make chat a better and more useful virtual space for everyone. The next chapter is meant to help with that.
Chapter 2 — Chat etiquette
One-to-one chats
By a one-to-one chat I mean a private conversation with a single recipient.
Let us start with text messages. Each message sent triggers a notification for the recipient. If someone opens a conversation by firing off a barrage of messages, the recipient gets a barrage of notifications. What began as a useful alert turns into irritating noise. Making the effort to start with one well-written, clear message that contains everything you want to say is a sign of respect for the recipient, and reduces the risk of being muted. The situation changes if the recipient wants to reply and sees that the sender is active in the chat—in other words, online. In that case, paradoxically, it can be more considerate to break a long message into a series of short but well-formed ones, so neither person has to wait too long for a reply. Otherwise, a single message that includes everything is always preferable. Used kindly and considerately, a chat message is the best compromise: unlike a phone call, it does not interrupt or distract the recipient from what they are doing, while still getting a reply much faster than email.
Now for voice messages, which should be used sparingly. Listening to a recording takes much longer than reading a text with the same information, for two reasons, one obvious and one less so. The obvious one is that spoken language is full of pauses, silences, and mistakes, and can be delivered at any speed. The less obvious reason is that spoken messages are improvised and cannot be reviewed or simplified; they are therefore often longer than necessary, more convoluted, and harder to understand. For the sender, the situation is the reverse: writing a well-structured, carefully thought-out ten-word message that is easy and quick to understand takes much longer than recording a voice note with many more words. Pascal is credited with the famous line, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” It takes time to check, edit, and reread a written message until it is concise and effective. With voice messages, then, the sender saves time at the recipient's expense. Listening at twice the speed only partly solves the problem, or only appears to.
To avoid seeming selfish whenever you send a voice message, consider the exceptional circumstances in which one is actually preferable to text. If you need to send something urgently and are in a real hurry or have your hands full, a voice message is better than nothing. The same goes for situations where speaking aloud or the surrounding sounds provide meaningful information for the other person—by conveying your state of mind, letting them hear a particular noise, or moving them emotionally.
Group chats
A group chat is a conversation involving three or more people at the same time. All the advice given so far for one-to-one chats applies, with one major aggravating factor: the effects of our behaviour, good or bad, are multiplied by the number of participants. One notification becomes many. If one person splits a message into fragments, they multiply the notifications again: several messages for several recipients. A two-minute voice message does not take only two minutes to listen to; multiply those minutes by the number of participants and they can easily add up to hours taken from everyone's lives.
The least obvious, but most important, part of group-chat etiquette comes just before any rules about how to behave. Since good behaviour in a group chat can only limit its side effects, not eliminate them, the best remedy is to decide carefully whether a group chat should be created at all. Several criteria help determine whether the tool is suitable. If we weigh them thoughtfully, the answer will often be no: a group chat is not needed. I know that deciding this is not as easy as creating a group chat; it takes more than a couple of taps. Here are some of the main criteria, not an exhaustive list, to make the point.
- The participants. If you already know who will be in the group, you probably know something about how they behave. Think about their track record as chat users and whether most of them are inclined to use the medium thoughtfully and well. If not, a group chat is usually unsuitable, however worthy its purpose may be, because it is unlikely to achieve that purpose.
- The number of participants. If there will be dozens or hundreds of people, the chat can become a channel for misinformation. It is a little like today's media landscape: the huge increase in television channels, streaming platforms, and social networks makes it impossible to know whom it is worth listening to. Each participant in a chat can be seen as a medium in their own right; the more there are, the harder it is to keep up and tell who the most authoritative voices are. When a group gets too large, many people ignore it or simply leave. It makes more sense to split into small topic-based groups or create an announcement channel where administrators post essential notices and everyone else can only read them.
- Rules. In early chat services, when you entered a channel—the equivalent of today's groups—the first thing you saw was the rules set by its moderators. Anyone who broke them could be banned. A good way to decide whether to create a chat for people with very different temperaments is to ask whether its creator can write concise, effective rules and has the character and resolve to enforce them.
- Purpose. The most important criterion is whether a group chat is the right tool for the purpose its creator has in mind. Here are some examples where the tool, combined with the good manners I will discuss later, is suitable:
- A committee chat for an organisation. A committee usually has only a few members, and it is natural to use the chat for a limited purpose, such as arranging in-person meetings, sharing notices, or asking for informed opinions.
- A chat among close friends. There are very few close friends, which is a good start. A group chat lets them have light-hearted conversations wherever and whenever they want. Its playful, relaxing, and never urgent nature makes the tool particularly suitable. It can also be muted without offending anyone.
- A chat for relatives who live far apart. A thought sent to relatives at a distance can make them feel closer. Birthday and holiday wishes, or important news such as a pregnancy, wedding, or graduation, are occasional enough that a lively burst of messages can be enjoyable.
- A chat for a small team at work. If the office is the smallest operational unit, the group is small, making chat ideal for notices—for example, an unexpected delay—or requests, such as asking someone to cover a shift when something comes up. It is not hard to contain misuse: healthy workplaces are good at establishing boundaries between colleagues.
All these positive examples share one feature: the participants' contribution is worth more than the effort the chat requires. To make the point clearer, here are three cases where a group chat is unsuitable:
- A news agency. Chats used to repost news that participants already know tend to create background noise, concentrate active participation in a few people, and turn everyone else into passive or uninterested readers.
- An information desk. Unless a chat is deliberately created as a listening and support group with clear rules, it can become one against everyone's wishes and without any rules. Participation becomes sharply divided: some people ignore the messages, while others ask for and/or provide information.
- Chats based on belonging. Most unnecessary chats begin because people share a group identity: the same project, course, office, place of worship, and so on. Their unstated purpose is “anything and everything.” Their usual fate is to be abandoned or turn into a news agency or an information desk.
For completeness, when a request for information is not trivial and could genuinely help the whole group, it is always worth sharing with everyone, even if it falls outside the chat's main purpose. Otherwise, it is better to ask one person privately rather than seek help that is not really necessary by taking up shared space. The value participants add can be measured by how much new information they bring to the channel. That might be a joke—original or quoted, but a rare gem; a real-time update (“The main road is closed; I'm stuck in traffic”); news of a niche event; an original idea or proposal; or an insight (“I read this story, then another, and remembered something else; putting them together, I realised that…”). Novelty is the spice of group chats.
Having covered chats that are genuinely useful, I will add three rules specifically for group chats to the ones already discussed for one-to-one conversations. They are helpful when there are only a few people and essential when there are many. Their purpose is to avoid triggering swarms of replies that only create confusion and make the conversation harder to follow.
The first rule is to ask the right question. A question such as “Does anyone have a rare coin from 1965?” may trigger countless “no” replies, among which a useful or meaningful answer could get lost. A better message would be: “If you have a rare coin from 1965, please message me privately. Thanks.”
The second rule is not to reply when there is no need. Put yourself in the recipients' shoes. It takes a little mental effort to remember that not replying when nobody asked for an answer is neither rude nor disrespectful. By contrast, replying just to say you are sorry you cannot help does not help; it is counterproductive because it sends multiple notifications and adds noise that wastes the other participants' time.
The third rule is to use the right tools. See Appendix 1: Examples of useful tools for group chats. Dozens of free tools can run a poll or collect people's availability with a single click. Choosing, out of laziness, to send dozens of unhelpful, distracting messages instead is plain digital rudeness.
More broadly, before you let any technological tool someone offers or imposes make you feel better, ask whether it has really improved your life: has it given you more time for important things, helped you make fewer mistakes, made demanding tasks faster and simpler, or made you better informed, more aware, and more open-minded? And has it done all that without abusing the goodwill and patience of too many people?
With that chapter closed, I will look at two revealing cases. I will begin my discussion of parents' school group chats with the points made so far. Then I will go further, into legal, educational, psychological, and digital-safety concerns that we should understand. I especially want to raise awareness in the final chapter, which is about children's chats.
Chapter 3 — Parents' school group chats
I will start with a brief comment on the name commonly used in Italy for the group chat that brings together some of the parents whose children are in the same class at the same school: the “mothers' chat.” Although this chapter will strongly question whether such chats should exist at all, I have one genuine regret: that they are not commonly called “parents' chats.” It may sound like a minor distinction, but it does no good to mothers, fathers, or any other kind of parent or guardian. There is much to say about the distortions hidden behind the label “mothers' chat” and family dynamics that are not always constructive for children, but that is beyond my purpose. I will focus on what matters most to me: this section is also for parents and guardians who do not take part in the chat, regardless of whether the other parent does. The issue of parents' group chats starts with the structural problems discussed in the previous chapter, whose conclusions readers can draw for themselves, but goes much further: through the difficult territory of raising children well and all the way to protecting their safety. To make the point, I will build my argument around a series of familiar claims, imagining them spoken by a parent who is firmly defending this kind of chat.
- “Thanks to the chat, I have all the parents' contact details.” Setting up a complex system like a group chat and reducing it to a substitute phone book is completely disproportionate. A little socialising and conversation in the real world can achieve the same result and help us build strong relationships with the people we get along with best.
- “Thanks to the chat, I can ask what time the children finish school tomorrow or when the winter break starts. Someone can also remind everyone that the parent representative for the class or year group is being elected this evening.” All this information is already shared through official school and class channels; you just need to check them from time to time or when necessary. If your children are old enough, you can expect them to pass the information on themselves. This might be a good reason to ask the school to adopt an announcement channel that can send notifications.
- “If I have a question, I can ask.” Let us admit that sometimes a question is just an excuse for our own laziness; it has happened to me, too. That said, school or class announcements can sometimes be unclear—though this is not unique to schools and can happen anywhere. In those cases, I see at least three options. First, if the question can wait, raise it with a school contact or another parent the next time you meet. Second, if it is urgent, contact one parent privately and compare notes. Third, and in my view best of all—except when a mistake could cause irreparable harm—get it wrong, even badly. If only one parent gets it wrong, they will learn something they did not know before. If many or all parents get it wrong, the unexpected outcome may prompt the school to put its official channels in order so that parents do not have to resort to improvised solutions.
- “This chat has saved me so many times!” That sense of rescue is simply the first three points turned around. Behind every occasion when a parent feels rescued by the chat lie a phone book, a noticeboard, and an information desk disguised as a group chat. The real problem is that none of the participants is a contact-list service, news agency, or public-relations officer: each is simply a parent. It is unfair to expect (or believe) that so many people should rescue us when it is not really necessary. We are talking about children who attend school, not a local education authority. Think about it: thirty people are being mobilised to settle one person's minor question, which could be cleared up with a little patience or a glance at the child's school planner.
- “We use the chat to choose a gift for the teachers and the parent representative, organise trips and events ourselves, and invite people to birthday parties…” The answer is the same: make these arrangements outside the school or create temporary chats, since not everyone wants to choose gifts or attend events organised by other parents. And birthday invitations? They are a great chance to involve the real people at the centre of all this, whom we often forget: the children. Let them hand out invitations in class, drawn by them—or, even better, by you and them together.
- “The parent representative uses the chat to share unofficial but important information from the school and teachers.” In those cases, the representative can speak to some parents in person and ask them to pass the message along. They can prepare notes to hand out at school pick-up. Better still, they can create an announcement channel: not a chat in the strict sense, but a space where participants can only read messages sent by the administrator, who in this case is the representative. Any parent who wants clarification can contact the representative privately, online or in person. If those private questions reveal that everyone needs further clarification, the representative can start again—by word of mouth, with notes, or through the announcement channel.
- “We use the chat to share photos of our children from school trips or birthday parties.” In general, none of the participants has given written permission for those photos to be shared, and circulating them is not a good idea in any case. The serious problem of photos and videos of minors on social media is not limited to Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. It applies across the internet, including WhatsApp. There is no cure, but there is a vaccine—and taking it is the only responsible choice: never circulate personal information or media online, especially anything involving minors. Any information that leaves our phones and computers is irretrievably out of our control. Whoever receives it, in good faith or bad, can send it to others, and so on indefinitely; they can even publish it on social media, alter it, or manipulate it. Sending a couple of photos to a distant relative carries a limited risk. Sending photos to a parents' group chat, on closer inspection, means exposing sensitive information to dozens of complete strangers and saddling them with a serious responsibility.
After all this, I hope I have persuaded you not to create or join this kind of chat. If I have not, I will settle for having made you think about reviewing how you interact in it.
Chapter 4 — Children's chats
So far I have described poor behaviour among adults, with the constructive aim of suggesting ways to improve it. Adults are, by definition, more aware, sensible, and mature than children and teenagers, yet I have uncovered plenty of problems. Given all that, and allowing for the difference in age, what might happen if we gave a chat app to children? First, let us avoid a trap: the belief that “digital native” means having full command, awareness, and knowledge of these tools is wrong. It simply means having grown up with certain technologies around.
Giving children a tool such as chat—and many others—not only brings the problems already discussed, such as wasted time and a lack of consideration, in an even more extreme form; after all, we are talking about children. The serious issue is that it also adds far graver problems involving health and safety. The following sections describe several concerns, not necessarily connected to one another, but each of which is a good reason to delay giving children access to chat for as long as possible, even beyond age thirteen.
Terms and conditions
I will use WhatsApp as my example, while stressing that the same points apply in similar ways to other messaging services. Age limits and product features vary by country and can change over time. The remarks below reflect the terms and rollout status considered in the original Italian article; parents should check the current terms and requirements that apply where they live.
I remind myself of this first, because I almost never do it and should: read the WhatsApp Terms of Service for the European Economic Area at least once, as well as the terms for every service we sign up for. Knowing our rights and duties is the bare minimum for using a service properly and responsibly. At the time this article was written, WhatsApp's terms said the following about children under thirteen:
- They could use only special accounts managed by a parent or guardian, where those accounts were available in their country.
- The parent or guardian took full responsibility for the child's activity on the platform.
From age thirteen onward, WhatsApp did not impose these particular restrictions. In Italy, at the time, parent-managed accounts were still being rolled out: they were not available to everyone, and the eligibility criteria were unclear. So parents fell into one of two groups: those who had been given access to the parent-managed account feature, and those who had not.
If the feature was not available to you, the point to remember was that WhatsApp expressly prohibited use by children under thirteen. Consequently, if something unpleasant happened, Meta—the company that owns WhatsApp—would accept no responsibility, even in a case of wilful misconduct or gross negligence on its part.
The parent-managed account
The other possibility was that you were among the fortunate ones with access to a parent-managed account. The restrictions WhatsApp provided with these accounts were certainly useful, but few: no new contacts or joining new groups without approval; no AI; no “Status” feature, the carousel where photos are shared; and parental control over privacy settings. With that last feature, careful and forward-thinking parents could set privacy to its highest level: no one could see the child's name or profile picture, whether they were online, when they were last online, and so on. Children could then send text and voice messages, photos, videos, links, and other documents only to selected contacts and groups. This may sound reassuring, but it is not. Children are inherently immature and irresponsible, and can send all kinds of media, including highly inappropriate content, to other children who are just as immature and irresponsible.
Responsible parents
Until now, I have deliberately left aside the second point in the terms of service on children under thirteen; otherwise I could have finished writing this article straight away. It says that parents take full responsibility for their children's activity on the platform. Many people miss this point. It is true that in everyday life, under the law, parents are already responsible for their children's actions—certainly for those under thirteen. But we must not imagine that WhatsApp is a place where actions are not real because they are digital, virtual, or intangible. Nor should we assume it is a bounded, protected space where nothing bad can happen. Without invoking the most dreadful and heartbreaking news stories, which are only the tip of the iceberg, most unpleasant and traumatic events involving tools unsuitable for a child's age happen without attracting media attention. There is a dense, unsettling undergrowth of harm that sometimes never comes to light even within the family, only to have serious effects years later.
Neither WhatsApp, which cannot access message contents, nor parents can have a complete picture of what their children do on the platform. The situation is worse for children given a phone with no parental-control system at all, such as Google's Family Link on Android. It is worse still if the phone has a SIM card, which makes it possible to make and receive all kinds of calls and, above all, to browse almost anywhere on the internet—including places that are horrifying and hostile even for adults. You are not protecting your children if you let them go only as far as the courtyard and tell them to stay there, but then give them a phone with unrestricted internet access. That is exactly like giving them the freedom to go instantly anywhere in the world, including the most dangerous places, without their even realising it or having the tools to defend themselves.
Addiction and behavioural changes
Children see a phone as a toy; teenagers see it as a game. The trouble is that, by design, this tool can be addictive and lead to changes in cognition and behaviour. The addictive pull comes both from the scrolling mechanisms of social networks—which are not our subject here—and from notifications about chats. A notification that immediately pulls a child away from studying or from other games and constructive activities to find out what has arrived gives them an immense but short-lived reward. Once it fades, they seek another. If no new messages arrive, they send one themselves to trigger the thrill of waiting for a reply and prolong the satisfaction they feel when it comes. This constant distraction takes time away from hands-on, intellectual, and face-to-face activities. It reduces concentration and attention, can cause mood problems, and makes children less accustomed to the physical and mental effort needed to acquire new skills, understand and interpret texts, ideas, and unfamiliar situations, reason, and speak and write well.
The sense of reward and excitement offered by virtual interaction with peers—without effort or the challenge of putting yourself on the line—can become a trap for young people who are not given firm limits and rules that are actually enforced. Digital tools can accelerate skills that have already been acquired and, when appropriate, overcome distance and barriers. They must not become shortcuts or substitutes for real life. If they take the place of waiting, patience, reflection, reasoning, learning, practice, meeting, and physical contact, they can at best encourage harmful values and at worst lead to serious health problems. We should always remember this for the wellbeing of our children, who are still growing, developing, and learning.
The loneliness of digital natives
As I said at the outset, if even adults struggle to use chats properly, things become even worse with children and teenagers. We cannot expect them to restrain, moderate, and manage their use of these tools wisely and appropriately. I have also discussed the misleading idea behind the term “digital native”: it does not mean greater skill than other people, only familiarity with the existence and use of technological tools.
Another point applies to everyone, digital native or not: smartphones are designed to be easy to use. Manufacturers spend millions upon millions of dollars making them accessible to everyone. It is therefore easy to confuse a tool's ease of use with using it correctly and thoughtfully, which is rare.
Another trap, perhaps the most subtle, is that chats seem to reproduce the same interactions we have in person. Unfortunately, chatting and talking face to face have almost nothing in common. Once again, the medium is the message. At school, at home, and in other parts of everyday life, young people learn to socialise from birth through verbal and non-verbal language. Other people, especially older and wiser ones, continually guide and direct them. In the virtual world, by contrast, they are “alone”: there is no teacher or parent guiding them. Young people—and often adults too—have no real understanding of how a phone, computer, or the internet works, or how to communicate through chat in a suitable, constructive, safe, and respectful way.
Minimum risk, not zero risk
Anyone who works in the field knows that cybersecurity is not a product but a process. A process involves many different actors, making absolute security a purely theoretical concept—useful for studying models, but impossible in the real world. No matter how many restrictions, antivirus tools, and parental controls we install, malicious people can exploit whatever small opening remains to cause harm, especially to those who are generally more vulnerable, such as children.
Looking at it from the other side, children will always find ways, despite the technical restrictions we put in place, to make the most of all the time, contacts, and communication channels we allow them to use in chats. They are naturally curious and want to explore and test their limits. That is why an attentive adult can never be replaced by a screen.
An accelerator of bad habits
I have already said that in a chat you are alone, without guidance, supervision, or mediation. This, together with the fact that chat connects people—sometimes several at once, and always instantly—can accelerate unconstructive social dynamics. These range from copying spelling and reasoning mistakes to far worse behavioural vices, of varying severity, which can eventually lead to consequences that are hard to control because parents and educators may struggle to spot them early.
Chat is a useful tool for people who have already received a well-rounded education and, ideally, digital education too. It becomes dangerous when used during childhood and adolescence: it is not an educational tool but, as I have said, an accelerator of bad habits, including dangerous ones.
Appendix 1 — Examples of useful tools for group chats
The following tools prevent chaos and message overload in collective decision-making. Used in the right way and at the right time, they make group chats clearer and more effective.
When you need to run a poll, use the poll feature. State the deadline for taking part from the outset, then close the poll when the deadline passes. The tool should require no more than two messages: an announcement and the poll itself. If someone spots an error in the wording or needs clarification, they can message the person who proposed it. That person can then send a third message to clarify, if necessary.
When you need to arrange a meeting or event, a poll may offer options that are too fixed and inflexible. Various online tools, such as When2meet, solve this problem: the organiser can set a range of dates, and everyone can enter all the days and times when they are available. In this case, send one announcement with a link to the scheduling tool and set a deadline for submitting availability.
If you need to suggest gifts for someone, tools such as Google Forms can collect ideas. You can then review the results and put the options to a vote using the chat's poll feature.