WhatsApp splinter groups breed anxiety and paranoia – just like being on The Traitors

Could your friends be secretly messaging each other on a group chat that doesn’t include you? Olivia Petter looks into the phenomenon of ‘splinter groups’ and finds out why our tribal nature is at the root of social paranoia

Harry, king of the splinter group on ‘The Traitors’ (BBC/Studio Lambert)

We had to create a separate group,” my friend whispered to me over brunch one day, her voice fraught with fear like she’d just confessed to murdering the waiter. “We still exchange a few messages in the original one, just to make sure she doesn’t know. But obviously, we’re only really using the separate one properly.”

I didn’t understand. Hang on, so you have one WhatsApp group for your school friends and then another that doesn’t include one of the girls? “Shh!” she warned me, looking around surreptitiously. “It’s called a splinter group. And yes, that’s what we’ve done. Because none of us like this girl any more; she’s a nightmare. But we have to pretend she’s still part of the gang. You know how it is.”

Until that morning, I did not. This was a few years ago now, and I’ve since learnt that “splinter groups” are common practice among friends on WhatsApp. It’s no secret that the instant messaging app is a source of anxiety for many of us. Much has been said and written about how stressful it is to open your phone to an endless stream of messages and suddenly feel behind or left out in a conversation between friends in a group chat. Then there are the read receipts (the ability to see when someone has read your message and not replied), and the fact that you can see when someone starts and stops “typing...”, and so on.