this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
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The replies in this thread are disturbing, giving me a sense that Lemmy has a misogyny problem; maybe I was naïve, but I expected outrage about 4chan doxxing women trying to protect one another, instead I see lots of revenge enjoyment as if being doxxed on 4chan is justice for ... warning one another about dangerous men they encounter when dating?
The inability to empathize and take seriously the threats posed to women or to understand their motivation to protect one another is alarming.
There is no good faith extended, but also no evidence presented that instead of safety the app was just for gossip, it's just taken as assumed that women are wrong for using Tea and they all deserve to be doxxed.
I'm all for groups of safe spaces for women. Especially when it's designed to keep them safe while dating. I have my doubts that Tea was that. Even if it was advertised as such, "tea" is slang for the word gossip. I've heard stories from several sources that it was used to dox people as well. Not saying what happened to the users is right. I think some users here are just feeling smug that this might cause the app to fail or shut down.
Yeah, naming it "Tea" is really the cherry on top. I'd love to know more about the people behind this. It's hard to believe that anybody would be this oblivious. I guess the same kind of people who wouldn't secure their database.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/25/us/tea-app-dating-privacy-cec
It's a bit like Rate My Professor, but for dating.
Honestly I cyncially expect this kind of app might inevitably exist for rating people of all genders (or that dating apps might incorporate this Uber-style rating system), but the reason this app exists has directly to do with the violence women face from intimate partners.
The point is that men who are enjoying the doxxing of women who have used this app are ignoring the context, or even have a warped sense of the context, as if this is narrowly about (legitimate) privacy concerns and the harms caused by the app.
Even if the concerns about the app are justified, the revenge enjoyment betrays a view much harder to defend, that all the women who used the app are equally cupable, or that doxxing women using the app is equivalent to women doxxing abusive men through the app.
Men are not all equally privileged, but there is a broad inequality both to how violence is distributed and how that plays out in dating situations. Women are not wrong to fear men. One in three women have experienced sexual or physical violence, most of that violence being perpetuated by men.
Since this is the context for the use of this app, it's not neutral to doxx its users or to claim it's fair because men feel (legitimate) concerns about the app's privacy violations.
I agree 100% that women face many more dangers especially in the dating scene than men. I'm all for having resources available for them to remain as safe as possible.
I don't see how a Rate My Professor type app would work well for dates. I feel like people would only spend the time to rate poor dates. If you had a really good date with someone, you would presumably start dating them so why would you let everyone else know they are a good person to go out with? I have no doubt there are some awful people out there that others should be warned about, but this type of app is a bit too risky to justify that in my opinion.
The background check feature sounds much more legit, but I don't think a group chat feature needs to exist along side it.
All that being said, anyone enjoying the doxxing of others is just an asshole. There's definitely nothing fair about it from either side.
Sure does sound pretty toxic.
yeah, the app has obvious flaws, and the Rate My Professor style approach succeeds or fails depending on the quality of the users and moderators, and could easily be useless or become toxic - either way, I'm not defending this aspect of the app, it's clearly problematic.
Regardless I understand why women would want a resource like this, and that doesn't seem true for those in the comments who see the doxxing as deserved for using this app.
Nevermind the rest of the context, like 4chan being a bastion of right-wing, misogynist trolls who would target an app like this for political reasons.
Lemmy users approving 4chan doxxing women is a major red flag ... it might have something to do with how many Lemmy users come here due to being banned for their behavior on Reddit. Reddit isn't sending their best and brightest, and it shows. (This is just my speculation, though.)
There is absolutely no problem checking out a perspective date for criminal records or if they're on the sex offenders register. But they don't need an app to do that they can just reverse image search on Google themselves.
The app added that to give legitimacy to its gossip feature. If lots of women have been on a date with the same guy and all have a story to tell that story is going to get told regardless of whether there's an app enabling it or not.
Men not being able to even view the content on the platform and see if anybody is posting about them is an inherent problem with the fundamental design of the app.
Could you share said sources? It's irrelevant though because justifying this doxxing SHOULD mean that the entirety of 4chan is a justifiable dox target. If you don't believe that, then you should be against it happening against Tea users. They're at the very least guilty of the same thing (in this case. 4chan is guilty of much more heinous things than just this).
I 100% agree that it isn't relevant to the doxxing. I dont think the doxxing is warranted at all from either side. Most of what I saw about the app is just from various social media users as well as the Google PlayStore reviews. Personally I find it hard to believe the app wasn't made with the purpose to dox people just based on the name alone. The ads make it seem like a safespace for women and if that's all it was meant to be then it for sure had a very unfortunate name.
What does the name have to do with doxing? I know "tea" is slang for "gossip", but gossip ain't doxing.
A group of people with the intention of privately sharing details of people in order to track their behavior is definitely going to lead to doxxing. Maybe I'm getting the wrong idea, but it sounds like they are sharing the names of people they went on dates with. I assume that would include the city or town the date occurred which would infer where abouts they live. Given enough "reviews" of a single person I'm sure there would be sufficient info to call it doxxing.
It isn't the women who are wrong; it's the app developer and 4chan. But setting aside the data breach, creating a Yelp for dating is a ticking time bomb. They were going to get sued out the ass, data breach or no data breach. I don't know how many times this needs to happen, but I guess web developers have the memory of goldfish. There have been several attempts at something similar that got shut down for the obvious reasons. Making a website that rates human beings is always going to be a legal minefield.
Don't trust dating apps ever. Literally better off dating someone you meet at a park.
Less chance an algorithm set you up to fail.
How is this relevant to anything I said? We aren't even talking about a dating app here.
I understand what you're saying but dating apps exist because there are so many people who have no access to third places like that and don't get to meet anyone.
Partly that's down to covid killing a bunch of stuff but it was on the decline before then anyway. Businesses were shutting down and becoming online only, town centres are emptying out, full of nothing but shuttered businesses with nothing to replace them. And of course now everyone is working from home.
There was less and less everyday opportunity to meet people. Even if I go outside if other people don't then I'm just wandering around by myself.
Your comment was on top for me in my app, so I was like "oh how bad could it be.". Holy shit you're not wrong, there's some disgusting comments that are getting voted up.
I'm low-key disappointed and appalled by these community members who believe these women "deserve" it for ... Trying to help each other be safer?
saw this happening here, saw it happening in reddit threads on the topic, saw it all over the media cycle in the comments.
i agree, people’s visceral backlash against this app is steeped in a deep misogyny. most of these comments have a vapid absence of any sort of even basic recognition towards these women as people. talking about them like they’re abstract figures or test subjects up in here.
watching people take somewhat valid privacy concerns as an excuse to let loose their most toxic feelings towards women used to be the sort of thing only losers or emboldened megalomaniacs did in public, even just a decade ago.
in the past years i’ve just seen all my peers, regardless of political affiliation, manipulated into a cult of outrage that serves as another hamster wheel upon which capital may spin.
imtiredboss.png
The Tea app is agnostic. While its purpose and main use case was made for the safety of women in the dating scene, it was inevitably used to spread exaggerated or misleading information about otherwise innocent men. Imagine being a privacy-conscious individual, and breaking up with a toxic woman. She could go on to spread lies about you and even upload pictures of you to the reverse image search/ai. So even if you were doing everything right from a privacy standpoint, you’d still end up in someone’s private database, subjected to ai training, shared with the government, or who knows what. While I do see the purpose of apps like these, they can effectively take away someone’s privacy/dignity without them even knowing about it. Now imagine being a 4channer, someone probably even more privacy-conscious than lemmings, and possibly experiencing mental disorders like paranoid schizophrenia or autism; of course they’re drawn to hacking an app that would destroy their privacy. They are not sane individuals, so this event really was inevitable.
Look at the screenshot in the article. That's what their website looks like, it absolutely looks like it's focusing on gossiping rather than women's safety on dates.
Well lets be honest if someone made a gender inverse version ofctea many people would b concerned about what is being shared on the app. Honestly i find tesla disturbing and the 4 chan doxing dangerous. Both sides can be bad.
Those already exist. 4chan (yes, they even kind of invented cancel culture with going after "whores" in the late 2000's), kiwifarms, various manosphere forums, Andrew Tate's Discord server, etc.
Yeah amd those sites are not herald had a safety tool for men. They are seen vile pos.
sorry, are men concerned for their safety dating women such that a gender inverted version of this app makes sense? Your ignorance is what I'm talking about here ...
The need for it was not part of my point. The point was a gender flipped app would of course cause some outrage. Immediately there would be people cry "it's just for doxxing, stalking and revenge porn".
But to engage in some good Faith dialoige. Are some men concerned for their safety, yes.
Lemmy is full of people with a lot of technical knowledge, who look down on anyone without it. Just look at their responses to someone complaining and an issue on Windows, it's just a hundred people telling you what Linux distro they use.
It's not so much mysogyny, they just can't pass up the opportunity to be smug about something.
Tea could easily be used for two extremely different purposes:
The idea of Tea isn't bad-- I've thought about the potential utility of similar apps myself-- but most people who are reacting badly are recognizing that it's a nearly impossible moderation problem that will be used for bad things too.
of course, the app has obvious problems, but I don't see that as justifying the gloating and sense of revenge enjoyment happening.
Instead I see a kind of discontent about women I find concerning, which seems ignorant of the widespread violence women experience or what it's like for women who take risks when dating men.
Men are not all equally problematic or privileged, but they are generally in a position of power relative to women and are acting like the victims here.
They should direct their discontent to patriarchy which creates the situation where violence against women is dismissed or accepted, and which motivates women to use apps to check if the person they are dating has a history of violent behavior.
Patriarchy which perpetuates the narrative that men are natural predators and women natural prey is what victimizes men here, not the women who rightfully fear and feel victimized by the minority of men who are violent.
Pfft. They actually need a better half instead of being anti-social AI users.
They should care about nothing, and expect nothing.
That way, no entitlement, and no disappointment.
Why is everything we do, when we band together, seen as suspect and dangerous?
It's suspect and dangerous due to its design, not the fact that it's used by women. If there were an app where employers could rate their employees, it would have the same problems and I'd feel the same way about it.
Don't look up something called, and I'm not remembering it perfectly, 'the number,' in the US, anyway.
This is a safety feature of women social groups for time immemorial. It’s a piece of how we survived prior to the last 50 years, and it continued as we moved forward into the era of liberation. We talk to each other.
I realize the “guy code” is one of silence. Cheating? Bros won’t say anything or warn anyone, by this code. In fact, the opposite is demanded by that code. Woman do the opposite, that is how the woman code works. I’ve witnessed fallout in friend groups when these diametrically opposed codes meet on regards to another friend. Apparently, having lunch with the cheated on woman and letting her know what is happening is applauded by women and enraging to men.
The piece regarding cheating is about integrity and treating people right in addition to safety. The rest of it is usually just about safety.
We survived millennia between being treated like prized horses. uteruses/vaginas with life support systems attached, and animals to be beaten, by talking to each other. Warning each other. Helping each other, where able.
The anger here, from you, is 100% expected, but the ordinary nature of that anger doesn’t make women wrong for exposing safety concerns in the dating pool. Given the myriad of diseases, including the incredible comeback of syphilis the last couple years, cheating is also a safety concern. Cheating should be exposed, always.
I was not aware of this! I'll have to consult my bro handbook.
What anger I have is directed towards the shitty website that didn't protect their users' very private data, and I assume that's where yours is, too. (And, of course, 4chan, but fuck 4chan all day, every day.)
I don't know anything about your "guy code". I don't view other men as my allies just because we share a gender, and I don't view women as adversaries just because they have a different gender. I try to treat everybody the same regardless of gender. I'm not perfect, of course, since I grew up in the same fucked-up patriarchy as everybody else, but I do my best.
You seem to have very black-and-white thinking.
I'm actually neutral on this statement. I haven't had this experience, but if I knew that a friend was being cheated on, I think that the appropriate thing to do would be to inform them. If both the cheater and the cheatee were my friends, that would make things harder, and I would have a dilemma. If my friend is the cheater and I'm not friends with the cheatee, then I'm minding my own business. Again, though, I haven't had this experience, so it's hard to say what I would do for sure.
Been cheated on by 3 different women. Guess how many of their friends told me what was happening. 0. So does that mean that her friends actually identified as men, or that you're biased and actually this isn't a "men" thing? Not one of them "had lunch" with me, so they must not have been women.
I've literally been cheated on by 3 different women and never cheated on anyone myself. The one time I was the 3rd party, the woman lied and said her and her BF had broken up, but they hadn't. As such I'm absolutely sick of this whole "men cheat and women are perfect creatures who are perpetual victims" shit. Women cheat too.
Where's my "cheating cunts" app to post pics and shit talk them, that also includes "pro" features such as address and phone number? Turnabout is fair play, wdym "that's bad" when it's women but tea is fine?
Okay so you're now mad about some perceived social convention that you think all men follow. Ironic.
If one of my friends was cheating on his girlfriend and I knew I would definitely tell her, why wouldn't I? Of course, the likelihood is that if they were the type to cheat on their girlfriend they're probably not the sort of person I'd be hanging out within the first place.
So you're now self-selecting for obnoxious people who think that women are just trophies. But that's not "guy code" that's just crap people, and there are absolutely women who will cheat on men and their friends will cover it up and say things like "ooh what happens in Ibiza/Vegas".
Apparently the platform operated as some sort of gossipping/reporting system where unaware men and guys could be posted, so they could basicallly do the same thing that happened to them, all on one if the most unsafe system possible.
Honestly I see this as a consequence of their own actions mostly the database was unprotected. Their purpose was to document men behind their back. Turns out it backfired.
I've been seeing a lot of misogony here the past week or so. It's disheartening.
I wonder what that is about?
I don't think it's necessarily part of a larger trend, but it could be. I think it's just in reaction to some of the specific posts being shared.
And even if it was purely a gossip app, an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
This comment is one hour old, let's give you my SS and CC info
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"gossip" is for safety. It's often information that men don't want shared so it's painted like it's bad. Claiming women shouldn't gossip is just more misogyny.
There is some of that happening, like when women get together and discuss how they're being treated it's "gossip" and implied as immoral.
I think some men might read what you've said and think you are denying any toxic gossip exists, it's important to have nuance and not alienate men who otherwise would be allies, but I think overall your point is well taken.
Say a woman breaks up with a man for petty reasons, like the guy switching the channel on TV, or even the other way around.
And she decides to make up reprehensible shit about him on that app.
He essentialy becomes undatable, and he does not know why.