Where people can reach you

Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Discord, the group chat that never stops. These are genuinely good things — they are how you keep up with friends, cousins, and people who moved away. There is one difference between these and watching videos, and nearly everything worth knowing comes out of it.

The one rule I never have to answer. I can leave any conversation, any time, without giving a reason.

Nothing really disappears

Screenshots exist. Screen recording exists. A second phone pointed at the first exists. “Disappearing” is a feature of the app, not a fact about the world — the message vanishes from your screen, and whether it vanishes from theirs is entirely up to them.

So the test for anything you are about to send is not “do I trust this person right now”. People change, friendships end, phones get borrowed. The test is:

The send test Would I still be fine with this if it were on a screen at school, or on my grandmother’s phone, a year from now?

If the answer is no, it does not get sent. Not to your best friend, not to anybody. That covers pictures, but it covers far more than pictures — most of what people end up wishing they had not sent is something they typed about somebody else.

An account is just a name and a picture

Both of those are free, and both can be anybody’s. A profile that looks like a fifteen-year-old from two towns over costs nothing to make and takes about four minutes.

This does not mean everybody online is lying. Most people are exactly who they say. It means that you cannot tell from the account, so the thing to watch is not who they claim to be — it is what they do.

What it looks like when something is wrong

Almost nobody dangerous opens with something obviously creepy. It looks like friendship first. These are the things worth noticing:

• They get close very fast. Lots of compliments, lots of attention, telling you that you are mature or different or that they have never felt like this before.
• They want to move to a different app, quickly — somewhere with disappearing messages, or somewhere your parents have never heard of.
• They ask you to keep it secret. This is the clearest one on the whole list. Friendships that are good for you do not need to be hidden from everybody who loves you.
• They ask you for pictures, or for anything you would not want other people to see.
• They want to know where you are: your school, your town, what your bedroom looks like, when your parents are out.
• They get upset or guilt-trip you when you do not reply fast enough, or say you are hurting them.
• They offer you money, gift cards, game currency or followers.

Any one of those is a reason to stop and tell somebody. Not to panic — just to stop, and to say out loud to a parent or another adult you trust: this is happening, what do you think? You are not overreacting, and you are not getting anyone in trouble by asking.

If something has gone wrong

A group chat is still a room full of people

It stops feeling like one. Thirty names in a list feels like an audience instead, and an audience is easy to perform for — which is how perfectly decent people end up piling on somebody they would never say a word to in person.

Why nobody says anything

There is a name for this. Psychologists call it the bystander effect: the more people there are watching something go wrong, the less likely it is that any one of them does anything about it. Two things cause it, and both are at full strength in a group chat.

• Somebody else will. With thirty people in the room, saying something is everybody’s job — which means it is nobody’s.
• Everyone is reading the room, and the room is reading them. You see that nobody has objected and decide it must be fine, because surely somebody would have. Meanwhile twenty-nine other people are looking at your silence and thinking exactly the same thing.

So a chat where almost everyone privately thinks this is cruel looks, from the inside, like a chat where everyone agrees.

Worth remembering Nobody calling something wrong does not make it right. Silence is not agreement — it just looks exactly like it.

Here is the good half. The effect breaks the moment one person steps out of it. One all right, that is enough and others usually join in, because they were waiting for permission too. You do not have to be brave thirty times over. You have to be brave once, and you will almost never still be the only one a minute later.

So, in a chat that has turned

• Assume anything you type about somebody will reach them. Not might. Will. Screenshots travel further than the chat does.
• You do not have to be the hero who shuts it down. Not forwarding it and not adding to it is already refusing to be part of it.
• If you can manage the sentence, though, say it. All right, that is enough. Short. No speech, no telling anybody off.
• If you are the one being piled on: leave the chat, tell an adult, and keep the screenshots. It is not weak to get out of a room where people are being cruel to you.

Stop telling everyone where you are

Location sharing, maps that show your friends’ dots, photos with the location attached, your school in your bio, the same bedroom wall in every picture. Each one on its own is nothing. Together they are a map.

Turn location off for these apps. Share it with your family if they want it, and with nobody else. It costs you nothing and it closes the easiest door there is.

Streaks are not friendships

Streaks, read receipts, “active now”, the little typing dots, follower counts. None of that is an accident either. They exist to make you feel you owe somebody a reply, because a person who feels obliged opens the app more often.

You can break a streak. You can read something and answer tomorrow. You can turn read receipts off. A friendship that cannot survive you going to bed was never load-bearing.

You choose who gets to talk to you

Private account. Friend requests from people you actually know. Messages from friends only. Unfollow or mute anything that reliably makes you feel worse, including people you know in real life — muting somebody is not a declaration of war, and they will not find out.

And the rule from the first page still applies here, maybe more: what people post is their highlight reel, and that goes double for people you actually know.

So, again I never have to answer. I can leave any conversation, any time, without giving a reason.

Next: what an AI chatbot actually is →

This page is maintained by the Sioux Falls South Dakota Stake. The apps named here are not ours and are not connected with this site. This is not an official website of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.