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.
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.
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.
I think you are misunderstanding why people are upset.
It's horrible that these women were doxxed.
It's also horrible that a subset of women were doxxing men, which is what brought this negative attention to the site.
Misogyny is real in our society, misandry is real.
Saying things happen for sexist reasons when it was for a logical reason does a disservice to movements that seek equality.
The internet also cheered on the 4chan PII leak that happened recently, not becauase it's a male dominant space, but because they do shitty things like dox people.
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.
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
Let's say a vile, manipulative, entitled woman went on a Tinder date with a guy. He insists on splitting the bill rather than paying for her food. She feels insulted.
She then takes to Tea and her local Are We Dating The Same Guy Facebook group, slanders him with false accusations that he tried to sexually assault her, then posts his Tinder, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn profiles online. Suddenly he's being ostracized, receiving nasty messages and even loses his job from women bombarding his employer with negative phone calls, emails and comments about him.
Men have had their lives ruined by false allegations posted to AWDTSG communities before. But opposing the existence of these platforms is "misogyny", apparently.
This is a strawman argument, though. Sure, that can and does happen, but it isn't the existence of spaces like Tea that is problematic, it is the holistic relationship between men and women in our society, generally. Further, I'm clearly not saying opposing Tea is inherently misogyny. It is a very particular kind of reaction that I am talking about, and you know this.
Tea itself really isn't any worse than any other forum. You could have the same thing happen to a man on other platforms, there is nothing unique about Tea in that capacity and it is disingenuous to levy that criticism against the platform in isolation. People dislike it because they have a weird caricature of women in their head and assume every person on this app must have been a gossip or an evil person, yet there is no real basis for that claim other than the fact the audience is mainly women. Hence, the "misogyny," that you seem to not really have the prior life experience to see. You can look through my profile here. I've said plenty in support of men's rights and men's issues as well, I'm really not rabidly in coalition for a particular gender's rights or anything. I'm just calling it as I see it and the reaction to Tea on the web is largely sexist.
No one said false accusations aren't real or that opposing them makes you a misogynist. You're being intentionally obtuse and conflating a critique of people's treatment of women in public discourse with a critique of apps such as these generally to make it seem absurd to point out how sexist some of the reaction to Tea has been. Mostly because I think you saw the word "misogyny" thrown out and for some reason took it as a personal insult or something. I think most people would reflect upon that and I'd hope you would too.
I probably won't further respond because I'm getting the idea honest discourse and dialectic isn't your goal here.
The app is literally called Tea, as in "spilling the tea."
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.
Oh come on, Lemmy doesn't have that many users!
/s
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.
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.
And even if it was purely a gossip app, an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.