Chuck Darwin<p>In February, <a href="https://c.im/tags/Marc" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Marc</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Andreessen" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Andreessen</span></a> described the <a href="https://c.im/tags/Chatham" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Chatham</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/House" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>House</span></a> group chats to the podcaster <a href="https://c.im/tags/Lex" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Lex</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Fridman" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Fridman</span></a> as “the equivalent of [Soviet era] <a href="https://c.im/tags/samizdat" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>samizdat</span></a>” <br>“The combination of encryption and disappearing messages really unleashed it,” he said. The chats, he wrote recently, helped produce our national “vibe shift.”<br>They have rarely been discussed in public, though you can catch the occasional mention in, for instance, a podcast debate between <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mark" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Mark</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Cuban" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Cuban</span></a> and the Republican entrepreneur <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vivek" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Vivek</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Ramaswamy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Ramaswamy</span></a>, which started in a chat.</p><p>But they are made visible through a group consensus on social media. <br>Their effects have ranged from the mainstreaming of the monarchist pundit <a href="https://c.im/tags/Curtis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Curtis</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Yarvin</span></a> to a particularly focused and developed dislike of the former Washington Post writer <a href="https://c.im/tags/Taylor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Taylor</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Lorenz" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Lorenz</span></a>.</p><p>They succeeded at avoiding leaks (until, to a modest extent, this article) in part because of Signal’s and WhatsApp’s <a href="https://c.im/tags/disappearing" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>disappearing</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/message" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>message</span></a> features, <br>and in part because the groups had formed out of a mix of fear and disdain for journalists they believed were “out to get us,” as one member put it.<br>“People during 2020 felt that there was a monoculture on social media, and if they didn’t agree with something, group chats became a safe space to debate that, share that, build consensus, feel that you’re not alone,” <br>said <a href="https://c.im/tags/Erik" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Erik</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Torenberg" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Torenberg</span></a>, an entrepreneur who was the first employee of the tech community hub Product Hunt. <br>As <a href="https://c.im/tags/Krishnan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Krishnan</span></a> was setting up a set of tech group WhatsApp chats at a16z, <a href="https://c.im/tags/Torenberg" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Torenberg</span></a> independently founded a group of tech chats on WhatsApp and some more political Signal chats.</p><p>“They’re having all the private conversations because they weren’t allowed to have the public conversations,” Andreessen told Torenberg on a recent podcast, <br>after claiming in the name of secrecy that he’d never heard of such groups. <br>“If it wasn’t for the censorship all of these conversations would have happened in public, which would have been much better.”<br>Their creations took off: <br>“It might not seem like it, because of all the sh*t that people still post on X, but the internet has fragmented,” <br>the Substack author <a href="https://c.im/tags/Noah" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Noah</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Smith" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Smith</span></a> wrote after my inquiries for this story spilled into public Saturday. <br>“Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens.”</p><p><a href="https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">semafor.com/article/04/27/2025</span><span class="invisible">/the-group-chats-that-changed-america</span></a></p>