There’s an expression reporters use, that you’ve “reported yourself out of a story.” That is, you had a hunch or a tip about something, but when you checked the facts, the story didn’t pan out. Sometimes, though, reporters stick to the narrative they’ve decided on in advance, and they don’t let facts get in the way.

The United Auto Workers union is striking for a better contract. The combination of a tight labor market and President Joe Biden’s pro-labor appointees to the National Labor Relations Board has given workers new leverage, leading workers in writers’ rooms, kitchens, and factories to demand more from their employers. This has been broadly beneficial, because many of the gains made by union workers benefit other workers.

Over the past few weeks, there have been whispers that former President Donald Trump would visit the striking UAW workers, with consequent fretting from Democrats in the press that Biden’s overall pro-union record would be overshadowed by photos of Trump on the picket line.

[David A. Graham: The press is giving Trump a free pass, again]

But that didn’t happen. Instead, it was Biden who went to support the striking autoworkers, joining a union picket line—something not even his most pro-union predecessors in the White House had ever done. “You saved the automobile industry back in 2008 and before. You made a lot of sacrifices. You gave up a lot. And the companies were in trouble,” Biden told the striking workers Tuesday. “But now they’re doing incredibly well. And guess what? You should be doing incredibly well too. It’s a simple proposition.”

A president on the picket line, telling workers they deserved to share in the wealth they had helped create, was a genuinely historic moment. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t do this. It’s shocking that Biden did.

But that wasn’t as interesting for many in the political press as the hypothetical story, the one that didn’t happen: a Republican presidential candidate winning over striking autoworkers by supporting their struggle for a better contract. Trump didn’t do that. In fact, Trump, who governed as a viciously anti-union president even by Republican standards, chose to visit a nonunion shop to give a campaign speech in which he said, “I don’t think you’re picketing for the right thing,” and told them it wouldn’t make “a damn bit of difference” what they got in their contract, because the growth in electric-vehicle manufacturing would put them out of work.

Telling striking workers that they should give up trying to get a better deal is not supporting workers or supporting unions; it is textbook union-busting rhetoric that anyone who has ever been in a union or tried to organize one would recognize. In other words, Trump did not go to Michigan to support striking workers at all. He did what cheap rich guys do every day: He told people who work for a living to be afraid of losing what little they have instead of trying to get what they deserve. This is not comparable to, nor is it even in the same galaxy as, supporting workers on a picket line. It is a poignant metaphor for the emptiness of right-wing populism when it comes to supporting workers—a cosplay populism of superficial “working class” aesthetics that ends up backing the bosses instead of the workers.

The narrative repeated ad nauseam by the political press that Trump was supporting the autoworkers was simply false. Should he reach the White House again, there’s little reason to doubt that his policies and appointments will be as anti-worker and anti-union as they were the first time.

“Just look who Trump put in the courts,” Dave Green, the UAW regional director for Ohio and Indiana, told the Associated Press this week. “Look at his record with the labor relations board. He did nothing to support organized labor except lip service.”

Some narratives, though, are too fun to let go of. So The New York Times reported that Trump was set to “Woo Striking Union Members,” without mentioning that he is appearing at a nonunion shop; The Wall Street Journal likewise left that out. Politico announced that Trump was going to “address striking auto workers,” acknowledging only later in the story that his appearance would be at “a non-union shop.” Many major news outlets did something similar, writing up a Trump campaign event in a way that left the impression that Trump was going to speak with striking autoworkers.

Many reports led with the suggestion that “current and former union members” would be in the audience, but that’s irrelevant. You could go anywhere in Detroit and find a crowd composed of “current and former union members”—it’s Detroit! The relevant fact is that Trump is not supporting the autoworkers’ efforts to win a contract that allows them their fair share of the wealth they create. What the Trump campaign wanted was ambiguous headlines that might suggest he was supporting workers he was not in fact supporting, so that he could get credit for something he didn’t actually do. And the political press largely obliged, repeatedly muddying the distinction between supporting union workers on strike and having a campaign rally.

[Read: The real issue in the UAW strike]

The Trump campaign is very good at manipulating the media, because it understands that liberal ideological bias is not the primary factor in shaping media coverage. The press, instead, is biased toward having a spectacular or interesting story that people want to read or watch or hear about. If you’re clever, you can manipulate the press into telling the story you want by making it seem fun and exciting, even if the story is incorrect or misleading. Given how easily the Trump campaign got the political press to take the bait here, there’s little question we’re in for a long campaign season in which it does it over and over again.

There’s another saying in journalism that’s supposed to be ironic: “Too good to check.” That’s when you hear something that sounds like a great story and you don’t check whether it’s true, because you want it to be true. You are not supposed to do this. But some narratives, it seems, are just too good to abandon.

Here’s just a sample of group chats that have been messaging me recently: college friends, housemates, camp friends, friends I met in adulthood, high-school friends, a subset of high-school friends who live in New York City, a subset of high-school friends who are single, a group of friends going to a birthday party, a smaller group of friends planning a gift for that person’s birthday, co-workers, book club, another book club, family, extended family, a Wordle chat with friends, a Wordle chat with family.

I love a group text—a grext, if you’ll permit me—but lately, the sheer number of them competing for my attention has felt out of control. By the time I wake up, the notifications have already started rolling in; as I’m going to bed, they’re still coming. In between, I try to keep up, but all it takes is one 30-minute meeting before I’ve somehow gotten 100 new messages, half of them consisting of “lol” or “right!” I scroll up and up and up, trying to find where I left off, like I’ve lost my place in a book that keeps getting longer as I read.

For better or for worse, we might be in the Age of the Group Chat. WhatsApp, the most popular messaging service worldwide, gained more than two and a half billion active users from 2012 to 2023, and is projected to grow 18 percent more by 2025; one study found that less than 2 percent of participants had only one-on-one chats on the app, and concluded that “the group chat feature is used frequently by nearly every WhatsApp user.” Of course, you can also group-chat with SMS, iMessage, GroupMe, Messenger, WeChat—or some combination of these and other platforms. In a recent survey of roughly 1,000 Americans, 66 percent said they’ve felt overwhelmed by their group messages, and 42 percent said that group chats can feel like a part-time job.

Just a few years ago, we might have done more of that chattering online. But with X (formerly known as Twitter) in a state of disarray, Facebook falling out of favor, and Instagram taken over by ads, social media is feeling less and less social. Jeffrey A. Hall, a communication professor at the University of Kansas who studies technology and relationships, calls this the “twilight of the social-media era,” in which “the distance between using it for talking to your friends and what we have now” is bigger than it’s ever been. He believes that although those sites aren’t fostering real connection—advice, inside jokes, updates, memes—nearly as much anymore, people might be reclaiming it with group chats.

[Read: Zombie Twitter has arrived]

That connection is a wonderful thing. Talking in a grext around the clock can feel like you and your fellow group members are facing the world together—and reaching out to everyone individually about all the stupid little details of your day would simply be impossible. But being kept constantly in the loop can feel unsustainable. I’m starting to learn that once you begin moving through life as but one humble node in a dense network of messagers, it’s hard to get untangled. To borrow from Dungeons & Dragons, the Age of the Group Chat seemed like it would be Chaotic Good—but it’s verging on Chaotic Evil.

Group texts are hardly the only demand on our time and attention these days. And yet, the researchers I spoke with agreed that they can be uniquely unwieldy. They both contribute to and reflect the complexity of our social worlds, Kate Mannell, a digital-media researcher at Deakin University, in Australia, told me. Creating a grext is so easy that you can end up with a separate chat for nearly every iteration of any group, each with its own particular dynamic. You might start with one chat, and then create another without one member who moved away, and then another to bring in a friend of a friend. (When I want to text my high-school friends in New York, I actually have to stop and think: Should I use “Big Juicy Apple” or “The Actual Big Apple”?) Compared with a one-on-one thread, in which the other party will typically pause until you respond, group chats aren’t so easy to manage. Messages can flow in all day, whether you’re free to reply or not—and if you aren’t on your phone when a particular conversation is going down, you might miss it entirely.

Those features aren’t all bad. Grexts are good at mimicking the casual back-and-forth of in-person dialogue, and the result can be more dynamic and fun than a two-person thread. Having a chat going also means you have a space to share mundane little updates throughout the day. Studies have found that group chats can contribute to group cohesion and shared fun. A group text can be a refuge, and a reminder that you’re part of something.

Some researchers call this “ambient virtual presence”: Even when you’re alone, you’re not alone. Annette Markham, a digital-culture researcher at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, in Australia, has compared this phenomenon to echolocation, the process that some animals, such as bats and dolphins, use to locate objects: They produce a continuous sound and use the resulting echo to sense what’s around them. Humans might use technologies such as group chats in a similar way—as a call-and-response, taking in information about their social networks and locating themselves within those webs.

[Read: No one knows exactly what social media is doing to kids]

But taking in too many signals can be overwhelming. Joseph Bayer, a communication professor at Ohio State University who studies mobile technologies, told me that group chats can create a “waterfall type of effect,” where messages keep flooding in and adding up. Eventually, you’re underwater. Adding to the chaos, Katharina Knop-Hülß, a mobile-media researcher at Hanover University, in Germany, told me, different chat members all bring their own personalities, communication styles, and expectations for group norms. (“There’s a lot going on.”) Mannell noted that those norms haven’t been settled, in part because group-chatting—and texting in general—is relatively new, and its features are constantly changing. (Updates to iMessage, for instance, have granted the ability to reply in a thread to specific texts, to tag people into a message, and to “react” with a symbol such as a heart or thumbs-up.) She’s found that without a standard etiquette, people have very different ideas about what degree of responsiveness is required—which can cause real tension.  

Fear of that tension can make muting or even leaving a chat feel daunting. And anyway, you might not want to miss out, even if you are overwhelmed; the desire isn’t to exit the room so much as to crack a window. I left my friends’ Wordle chat once because I’d stopped playing, but I had to rejoin when I learned that someone had used it to share a life update; never again would I be left in the dark. Now I usually just lurk silently in the chat, occasionally reacting with an exclamation point to a good score. If group messaging is like echolocation, then disconnecting can be disorienting—like losing the “I am here” dot on a giant existential map.

Grext anxiety is hard to resolve because it isn’t really just about the group-chat form or even mobile technology in general; it’s about the eternal tension between individual and collective identity, between being our own person and being accountable to others. Ultimately, most of us do want connection, even if it involves some obligations; we’ll take an avalanche of messages when we’re busy if it means we can reach out when we’re hurting.

[Read: America is in its insecure-attachment era]

Still, we’d do well to notice when our chats are giving us more dread than joy, or when they’ve multiplied to the point that we don’t even associate them with intimacy and connection anymore. If we’re turning to group messaging as social media starts to feel less social, we should be holding on to the group chats that really help us talk to people, and perhaps relinquishing the ones that feel as simultaneously crowded and empty as my social-media feeds do now. Hall told me that of all the different ways you can use social media, the evidence suggests that actively talking to people you care about—about subjects you care about—is what’s likeliest to contribute to your well-being.

His general advice is this: Let go of “zombie” groups—grexts that are carrying on but that don’t really interest you. Turn your attention to the ones you most value. When you can, see people in person or give them a call instead.

But when you can’t, you’ll just have to accept that belonging takes some effort. “Those responsibilities often come with annoyance and interference and frustration,” Hall told me. “But that’s the nature of relationships, right?” Between “The Actual Big Apple,” “Lonely Hearts Club,” and “Wordle Warriors,” I’ve wracked up dozens of notifications while finishing this story—and ultimately, I’m happy I got them.