Who amongst us hasn’t scoffed and bitched and complained; hasn’t said something mean dressed up as “joking” about someone else; hasn’t ranted and moaned and said, “Sorry, but I just need to say something quickly” to their side-chat?

You know, the side-chat: that circle of safety on WhatsApp with a maximum of two to three others, siphoned off from the main-chat that contains, well, everybody else? The one that’s getting a particularly bad rap, these days (and deservedly so, whether or not we admit it) thanks to being called out by celebrity mums like Ashley Tisdale French. That side-chat.

Tisdale, 40, dropped a truth bomb to end all truth bombs when she published an essay in The Cut this week, saying she left a “toxic” star-studded LA mum group she belonged to due to its “mean girl” behaviour.

“By the time we started getting together for playdates and got the group chat going, I was certain that I’d found my village,” she wrote. “But over time, I began to wonder whether that was really true. I remember being left out of a couple of group hangs, and I knew about them because Instagram made sure it fed me every single photo and Instagram Story. I was starting to feel frozen out of the group, noticing every way that they seemed to exclude me.

“I could sense a growing distance between me and the other members of the group, who seemed to not even care that I wasn’t around much. When everyone else attended a birthday dinner together, I was met with excuses as to why I hadn’t been invited.” Tisdale went on to say she realised her group had a pattern of leaving someone out – “and that someone had become me”. So, she texted the group chat one final time, saying: “This is too high school for me and I don’t want to take part in it anymore.”

And it went off. For while Tisdale didn’t mention the name of the mums explicitly, she’s known to have been in a close girl gang with the likes of Hilary Duff, Mandy Moore and Meghan Trainor – and Duff’s husband, Matthew Koma, clapped back just a day after her essay went public.

On 6 January, Koma posted a fake magazine cover of himself, alongside the headline: “A mom group tell all through a father’s eyes: When You’re the Most Self-Obsessed Tone Deaf Person on Earth, Other Moms Tend to Shift Focus To Their Actual Toddlers.” And he added (seemingly sarcastically): “Read my new interview with @thecut.”

Cue, I imagine: 31 notifications (eyes emoji, popcorn motif and bomb, bomb, bomb kapow!).

But was Tisdale wrong to expose the sharp nails and forked tongues of the classic mum group? I don’t think so. And this is why: because it’s all true (open-mouthed emoji, “she did not just say that!”)

I, for one, knew I had a problem the moment I felt the pressure to bitch about an acquaintance on a group, aptly, called “Breakaway”. Hands trembling, I typed (and typo-ed) my way through a snarky riposte ripping into what someone else had said that had pissed me off, before hitting “send” to my trusted circle of three friends, the ones with a sense of humour.

They were the ones, I told myself, who wouldn’t bat an eyelid about me being offended, disguised as a joke; the ones who had already eye-rolled and groaned and shared my unthinkable horror behind the scenes when the Year 8 school WhatsApp chat got split into two separate groups: with one named “Info & Comms” and the other titled “Opinions & Chat”.

And when, on said “Opinions & Chat”, a mum calling herself “Supermum” started banging on about how she’d taught her child Latin during the holidays; and why don’t the kids get more homework; and threatening to report the school to Ofsted for a particularly bad jacket potato, the first place I ranted about it (all of it)? “Breakaway”. My safe space, my circle of trust. Oh, and another group with a bunch of completely different women in it called “Bitches” (touché).

I’ve been guilty of it too many times to mention, I hold my hands up to that. From ranting about a friend’s terrible boyfriend (”why does she stay with a man who treats her badly and looks like a boiled egg?”) to Ozempic (“he must be on the jabs, nobody loses that much weight that quickly”) and even work ethic (they would be so good at that – why won’t they apply?), the lure of the side-snark is hard to resist.

And it’s not even limited to close friends, like Hilary and Ashley – my local neighbourhood WhatsApp group became a source of side-snide and contention, recently, when someone on the street blazed my The Nightmare Before Christmas homemade advent window, twice (beginning with the snarky, IRL comment: “Have you forgotten to take down your Halloween decorations?”). I found myself taking to social media to rant about it publicly and to draw a couple of hundred Instagram followers into my one-man band of disgruntled disbelief.

When the same woman (let’s call her *Sandra) went in for another jibe on the group chat, after she saw my advent efforts – “The bats make sense now!” she wrote, posting it to (let’s count them) 248 members – I went straight to the side chat before I could stop myself, posting a screenshot of her comment with the caption: “THE BATS ALWAYS MADE SENSE, SANDRA!” I even attached that gif of Elmo on fire, arms outstretched to the burning sky (if you know, you know). The side-chat is toxic – and that’s precisely what makes it so alluring.

Which is why I’ve made a New Year’s Resolution to stop doing it; to change my ways and to break free from the temptation to bitch; and to instead live by the adage: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

Now, I wonder what people are saying in the side-chat about that…

*Names changed to protect the guilty and annoying.