Tip: if you’re going to carry on a texting relationship with a notorious troll, you should go ahead and set your messages to disappear.
Junior Senator and Vice Presidential hopeful JD Vance learned that lesson the hard way, by having the Washington Post publish news of his texts with notorious far-right attention-seeking nerd, Charles C. Johnson.
In general, the quoted messages don’t tell us a lot. According to the Post, Johnson first pinged Vance the day after Vance won his Senate election in 2022. The two texted over the next 20 months about things like Ukraine, UFOs, and Israel. Signal is an end-to-end encrypted platform so how, exactly, did journalists get ahold of these messages?
Johnson showed them. “The texts, sent over the encrypted messaging app Signal and provided by Johnson to The Washington Post, show the 40-year-old senator engaged in the kind of freewheeling communication ordinarily tightly controlled by congressional staff,” the story said.
It doesn’t matter how secure the platform you’re using if the person you’re texting is a messy bitch who loves drama. And Johnson loves drama. The red-headed blogging weirdo has been a fixture of extremely online circles for years now. A former Daily Caller contributor who once called himself an investigative journalist, Johnson is best known for making headlines for bizarre trolls, white nationalist ties, and unhinged behavior.
Twitter banned him for life in 2015 for soliciting funds to “take out” a civil rights activist. He once claimed to be the co-founder of facial recognition giant Clearview AI. He met with Palmer Luckey and Trump to talk about the border wall in 2017. And started a crowdfunding website famous for raising cash to defend an avowed Neo-Nazi.
He’s not the kind of guy you want a record of talking to.
That’s why Vance should have used one of Signal’s best features: disappearing messages. Anyone using Signal can set up their messages to vanish after a certain amount of time has elapsed. With Signal, they can do it at the account level or per group chat. Critically, the messages will be deleted from both sides of the conversation. This should, hypothetically, stop someone you’re talking to from sharing the texts with anyone. Other apps have disappearing messages but are typically not as robust or customizable as Signal’s feature.
Disappearing messages are key if your group chat is spicy and you don’t want anyone to ever see it. It’s not perfect though. It won’t stop a malicious contact from screenshotting the messages before they vanish. But if you’re worried about that kind of behavior, you probably shouldn’t be talking to that person at all.
