Answers to Every Question About the TEA App Drama

"Why does TEA exist anyway?"

"There are reasonable questions about the structure of the app; men claim to have already gotten past the app’s gender verification process by posting selfies taken by women, or by using AI to generate photos of themselves as women. (We will leave the issue of the cultural, political, and legal minefield of verifying anyone’s gender in 2025 for another day.)

Men who have had the misfortune of appearing on Tea have valid concerns about the conduct it enables. Some of the information that a user might make public on the app – behavior on dates, information about sexually transmitted diseases, even criminal history – is exceptionally sensitive and might have been originally disclosed to another person with the hope that it would be kept private. Human interaction is complex and people all have different standards for what they find objectionable; what one person may interpret as a playful joke, another may interpret as a line-crossing insult worthy of being broadcast to the world. Men have complained that the app’s group chat function invites not only discussions of misconduct or safety, but mockery of their appearance, or even the mere fact of their decision to end a relationship at a given time – a right everyone has. What kind of accountability could there be here for information that is posted that is inaccurate or simply hurtful?

Still, one need not strain to recognize the many reasons why an app like Tea was created in the first place. There are reams of data stretching back a generation regarding safety on the internet and in dating as an obvious concern for women. For starters, 2023 data from the Pew Research Center found that women are more likely than men to say that dating apps feel unsafe. In addition, incontrovertible statistics have long documented America’s rate of intimate partner violence against women. Statistics show that over a third of women have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner. Women aged 18 to 34 – years in which many women who choose to date might be doing so – experience the highest rates of intimate partner violence. The app largely trended this week due to many women sharing potentially important things the app helped them discover, such as when dates were on sex offender lists or had histories of domestic violence. In light of these realities, concerns from men about the legality of an app like Tea seem really inadequate.

However, perhaps the biggest issue Tea exposes isn’t with the law, but with the digital age generally. Much internet communication is largely anonymous and pooled (i.e., visible to all others), which encourages piling on. Internet forums that allow people to air grievances blur the important social and legal line between accountability and punishment. Comment threads, whether on public forums or a closed, women-only dating safety app, welcome, and even invite, vigilante justice. At times, that form of justice may be useful and valid, given the lack of other channels of recourse – whether legal or personal – aggrieved daters may have.

Still, Tea — the app — is not the problem. It is a symptom of a far broader issue: how people share information about each other, and date, in a national climate characterized by profound personal distrust, where women are treated poorly online, and with a ballooning number of platforms that empower individuals to publicize unverified information about others. (Note that the aging writer of this piece met his wife the old-fashioned way: on a website.) While doing so can sometimes create legal problems, the biggest concern in all of this is about all of us, not a single app."

(click photo for full article)