What It's Like in the Group Chat

About

What It's Like in the Group Chat refers to a trend on TikTok in which you use alternating text-to-speech chat effects and emojis to represent conversations that might happen in specific group chats. The trend is collected largely under the hashtag #groupchat.^[6]

Origin

On January 9th, 2021, @lexikaela uploaded a video to TikTok^[1] with the on-screen caption, "this is how it is making plans in the groupchat" and five different emojis of women's faces (shown below). Throughout the video text appears to the right of the emojis, which is read by the text-to-speech voice, representing a comedic group chat conversation. The video gained over 13 million views in 6 days. It's unknown whether this is the first video in the trend, but is the most popular known upload from the earliest date that the trend began.

Spread

On January 9th, 2021, @joeygoddard uploaded a video to TikTok^[2] representing "the boys" in a group chat, garnering over 1 million views in 6 days (shown below, left). On the same day, @quinn.eckelkamp uploaded a video^[3] following the trend where he recreates a supposedly real conversation from a group chat where he comes out as bisexual, garnering over 470,000 views in the same span of time (shown below, right).

On January 10th, @rcabbab uploaded a video following the trend to TikTok^[4] representing retail workplace groupchats, garnering over 1.3 million views in 5 days (shown below, left). On January 11th, @mj4l_ uploaded a video to TikTok^[5] in which he shows how his girlfriend lets him know she's mad following the trend, garnering over 9.3 million views in 4 days (shown below, right).

On January 14th, StayHipp^[7] published an article detailing the trend. Around that date the hashtag #groupchat hit TikTok's trending page. As of January 15th, 2021, videos using the hashtag have collected over 1.6 billion total views.

Various Examples

Search Interest

N/A

External References