It sounds just like the plot of a Black Mirror episode. Single, straight girls log right into a courting app, however to not meet males. As a substitute, they’ll display screen native guys, utilizing pictures and user-reported “crimson flags.” The app is designed to make the expertise of discovering a accomplice much less dangerous, however it rapidly culminates in catastrophe.
That is already the trajectory of the Tea app, which skilled a current surge in recognition. It reached No. 1 on the High Free Apps chart late final month within the App Retailer and stays within the prime 10. The app at present boasts over 6 million customers, per its web site. Completely designed for girls, the “courting security device” is a cross between security community Citizen and assessment hub Yelp, permitting customers to put up nameless opinions of males, reverse image-search their pictures, and run background checks. A few of these options are paywalled, together with limitless searches for $15 a month. Its founder, Sean Prepare dinner, a former Salesforce product supervisor, created the app in 2023 after witnessing his mom’s “terrifying expertise with on-line courting,” from being catfished to unknowingly assembly males with prison information.
Predictably, a assessment app for human beings has not been universally common, drawing criticism from each males who feared having their data posted on-line and consultants who recognized severe privateness and defamation considerations, each out and in of the app.
Whereas Tea prohibits screenshots, TikTok customers have managed to put up their screens whereas scrolling by way of the app. Males, whether or not by way of word-of-mouth or accessing the app themselves, have additionally been capable of see and reply to their opinions. Along with gathering information to probably share with advertisers, Tea’s privateness coverage states that the corporate could share customers’ data to “reply to lawful requests and authorized processes.” As reporter Amanda Hoover wrote for Enterprise Insiderthis caveat “may open girls who assume they’re posting in good religion to defamation fits by disgruntled males whose reputations undergo by what has been posted about them, even when it’s correct.” It was nearly too predictable when Tea reported a cyberattack on July 25 that uncovered customers’ private data, direct messages, and selfies. Because of this, its messaging perform has been suspended.
In the end, the “identify and disgrace” premise of the app has drawn essentially the most controversy on-line, together with some bad-faith takes. It’s the type of panic and debate that occurred when the “Shitty Media Males” spreadsheet leaked in 2017 and following the launch of the now-shuttered courting app Lulu in 2014, which crowdsourced details about males in an analogous approach as Tea.
Whereas there are, as Prepare dinner’s causes for creating the app indicate, severe and justifiable causes why girls who date males on-line may search to guard themself by studying extra concerning the guys they meet, arguably, an app like Tea is problematic. The largest problem is {that a} commercially accessible app misunderstands the worth, in addition to the bounds, of whisper networks in preserving girls protected. Whereas these sources have confirmed to be needed in workplaces and the broader social world, they change into much more difficult and misused as soon as they’re commodified.
The courting world is tough, in methods large and small
It’s simple to learn Tea as a cynical try to capitalize on the distraught and dystopian panorama of courting proper now.
“Women and men are approaching courting assuming that different individuals are out to mislead them,” relationship skilled Rachel Vanderbilt says. “This consists of what they’re searching for in a relationship, what their values are, or whether or not they’re seeing different individuals. An app like this actually feeds into insecurities and distrust.”
On the similar time, surveillance and casual snitching have change into normalized within the means of discovering (or perhaps simply eliminating) a possible accomplice. Individuals repeatedly put up their unfavourable or just awkward communications on courting apps like Hinge for his or her followers to dissect. A big swath of storytime movies on TikTok are devoted to customers discussing unhealthy courting experiences, generally revealing the offender’s identify and turning them into infamous figures.
A dishy posture is widespread on this realm, and Tea made the selection to capitalize on that by having a reputation that’s queer slang for gossip. As one TikTok consumer identifiedthe truth that the courting security app, which donates a portion of its earnings to the Nationwide Home Abuse Hotline, makes use of such salacious advertising feels a bit odd and inconsistent. It implies a stage of frivolousness. Moreover, a picture on Tea’s web site exhibits one lady whispering to a different lady, who has a shocked — not precisely distressed — expression on her face.
Equally, the app’s use of “crimson flags” to indicate behaviors that might compromise a lady’s security has been equally problematic, given how loosely the time period is used on-line. A crimson flag may imply something from stalking habits, emotional abuse and manipulation, and bodily hazard to a person not texting again by a sure time. How, precisely, ought to customers resolve what sort of habits warrants itemizing? How expansive ought to a crimson flag be? Isn’t it an issue if it may possibly embody every part from severe bodily abuse to common, human errors?
Issues change into much more unreliable with the app’s prison background checks. Specialists have traditionally criticized a majority of these screenings on courting apps, like Tinder, explaining that gendered violence is usually unreported. Because of this, abusers aren’t typically interacting with the prison justice system. App customers are shopping for into an concept of safety which may be little greater than a mirage.
The issue with promoting a whisper community
In some ways, Tea is particularly a poorly made product. Nonetheless, the broader failure of apps of its sort, regardless of the demand, demonstrates how tackling social points like gendered violence could be antithetical to the objectives and methods of shopper capitalism.
An organization that “gender washes,” or leverages feminism for advertising, may effectively maintain equality as a real purpose, says Natasha Mulvihill, an affiliate professor of criminology on the College of Bristol. However, she explains, “revenue and advertising logics can imply these goals change into distorted, contradictory, and probably dangerous.”
The distortion right here is apparent within the advertising: to unfold extensively and gather customers, the app has to current a severe problem as enjoyable, mild, gameable — an analogous expertise as swiping by way of Tinder, for instance. Tea shouldn’t be alone on this; Lulu shared lots of the similar issues. Kicky advertising and free, user-driven definitions of unhealthy habits make the app extra interesting, whilst they obscure the gravity of the central concern.
In addition they take away the context and situations that beget whisper networks within the first place. A 2023 examinesurveying girls between the ages of 18 and 64, discovered that whisper networks helped “contributors make sense of their experiences and discover assist” in workplaces the place “sexual harassment shouldn’t be taken severely, and reporting sexual harassment is dangerous.” On an app utilized by hundreds of thousands of strangers, the solidarity you may need with a colleague coping with the identical creepy boss, and even the inherent belief you’d have with a pal warning you a couple of sketchy man, is lacking. The one factor that unites the customers is their heterosexual womanhood, leaving a number of area for various experiences, views, and intentions.
Catherine Falls Industrial/Getty Pictures
“There isn’t any assure that the data you might be receiving is sweet data or is truthful,” Vanderbilt says. “Are you getting real recommendation from somebody who has good intentions, or are you getting vindictive recommendation from somebody who has been harm earlier than?”
The premise appears partly based mostly on a notion that’s been ceaselessly disputed in a post-girlboss tradition — that girls, just by advantage of being girls, are all the time searching for one another’s finest pursuits.
There are even deeper contradictions, too: Whereas Tea intends to foster neighborhood amongst girls, it additionally implies that their publicity to harmful males is one thing they’ll personally handle.
Mulvihill says Tea purports a “neoliberal” concept of girls’s security as an “particular person problem of danger administration,” versus a “social and public coverage problem that everybody should be engaged in.”
“On the floor, this appears to be creating ‘neighborhood’ and ‘security in numbers,’ however paradoxically, danger administration approaches can result in responsibilizing particular person girls for managing males’s violence,” she says. “If they’re harmed, then they may really feel they ‘should have identified higher’ or ‘should have managed the danger higher.’”
Moreover, data shouldn’t be all the time a dependable protection in opposition to violence or different dangerous habits. Mulvihill relates this problem again to “crimson flags” discourse on-line in her 2025 examine referred to as “The New Specialists of On-line Relationship: Feminism, Recommendation, and Hurt” on Instagram, co-authored with Joanna Giant: “efforts at consciousness-raising and training are needed, however it can be crucial additionally to acknowledge that ‘realizing’ shouldn’t be sufficient.”
These overarching issues — that data, even when it’s correct and reliable, can possible by no means be full, and worse, that even good data nonetheless is probably not sufficient energy — are inherent to all whisper networks. It’s simply that rather more difficult when there’s an organization, not your colleague, fostering the murmurs.
Inevitably, it’s girls who face repercussions for wanting to interact with these sources, whether or not it’s apps like Tea or spreadsheets about problematic males, once they backfire. Already, disgruntled males on-line have countered the Tea app with options for apps that might ridicule and humiliate girls. Regulation corporations are issuing steering on how males who’ve been posted about on the app can legally retaliate.
If the Tea app achieved something, it confirmed that girls’s experiences with misogyny can’t be solved with a shopper product, and sisterhood can’t be bought at scale. If girls may defend themselves by scrolling their telephones, wouldn’t now we have found it already?
