Are you obligated to let others know when you decide to leave a chain of group text messages?
I haven’t counted them personally, but various sources estimate that as many as 23 billion text messages are sent every day throughout the world. While many of these texts might be useful to managing our daily lives, some are simply dross.
In the mix of text messages are group texts. Sometimes the recipients are aware they are part of a group text chain, but often these group texts come in unexpectedly from someone who decides to include us. These texts might be from a work colleague about an ongoing project. Or they might be from a family member keeping us and others abreast of some milestone or other. On other occasions someone who has our number decides to include us on some joke or story or meme they found amusing. Depending on the size of the routing list, responses to the original post may multiply quickly, resulting in even more distractions from more useful incoming texts.
If a group text is part of a conversation that we need to be part of – an ongoing work project, for example – it’s unlikely we should leave the chain no matter how tempted we might be. But if the chain is some random bit of information we didn’t ask for and don’t particularly need and is copied to a bevy of recipients whose numbers we don’t recognize, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with removing yourself from the chain. If doing so helps unclutter your inbox and manage unwanted distractions, it’s a simple enough process to remove yourself from the conversation. No harm. No foul.
If you do so, however, do you owe it to the original sender to let them know you’re opting out? If it’s a work text focusing on something with which you’re only tangentially involved, you might want to let the colleagues you see regularly know that you are opting out as a courtesy. If it’s a group text you asked to be part of, even if in the distant past, it also would be gracious to let the sender know you are leaving the discussion.
But if it’s an unsolicited group text concerning something you don’t have a desire or a need to know about, there’s nothing wrong with just leaving. Doing otherwise and sending a text to the group to let them know you’re leaving risks triggering a slew of new unwanted texts in response. Who needs that? Surely not you nor the others on the text chain.
If a friend or acquaintance includes you when sending something you find off-color, factually wrong or otherwise offensive, it could be worth it to send them a direct text to let them know why you find the text offensive and to please not include you on other such messages in the future.
The right thing when receiving unsolicited group texts is to decide which you really want to be part of and to leave the rest. If you’re thinking about sending a group text, the right thing is to be thoughtful and consider whether what you’re about to send is really worth adding to the billions of texts sent every day, many of which none of us need to receive.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.
Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.
(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
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