Why a whisper network app like Tea isn’t your friend

It sounds just like the plot of a Black Mirror episode. Single, straight ladies log right into a courting app, however to not meet males. As a substitute, they’ll display screen native guys, utilizing photographs and user-reported “purple flags.” The app is designed to make the expertise of discovering a associate much less dangerous, but it surely rapidly culminates in catastrophe.That is already the trajectory of the Tea app, which skilled a current surge in reputation. It reached No. 1 on the Prime Free Apps chart late final month within the App Retailer and stays within the high 10. The app at the moment boasts over 6 million customers, per its web site. Solely designed for ladies, the “courting security instrument” is a cross between security community Citizen and evaluation hub Yelp, permitting customers to submit nameless evaluations of males, reverse image-search their photographs, and run background checks. A few of these options are paywalled, together with limitless searches for $15 a month. Its founder, Sean Cook 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 data. 
Predictably, a evaluation app for human beings has not been universally fashionable, drawing criticism from each males who feared having their info 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 submit their screens whereas scrolling by the app. Males, whether or not by word-of-mouth or accessing the app themselves, have additionally been in a position to see and reply to their evaluations. Along with gathering information to doubtlessly share with advertisers, Tea’s privateness coverage states that the corporate could share customers’ info to “reply to lawful requests and authorized processes.” As reporter Amanda Hoover wrote for Enterprise Insider, this caveat “might open ladies 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 virtually too predictable when Tea reported a cyberattack on July 25 that uncovered customers’ private info, direct messages, and selfies. In consequence, its messaging operate has been suspended.In the end, the “identify and disgrace” premise of the app has drawn probably 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 the same manner as Tea.Whereas there are, as Cook dinner’s causes for creating the app indicate, severe and justifiable explanation why ladies who date males on-line would possibly search to guard themself by studying extra concerning the guys they meet, arguably, an app like Tea is problematic. The largest challenge is {that a} commercially accessible app misunderstands the worth, in addition to the bounds, of whisper networks in retaining ladies secure. Whereas these assets have confirmed to be vital in workplaces and the broader social world, they turn out to be much more difficult and misused as soon as they’re commodified.The courting world is tough, in methods huge and small It’s straightforward 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 persons are out to mislead them,” relationship knowledgeable Rachel Vanderbilt says. “This consists of what they’re in search of in a relationship, what their values are, or whether or not they’re seeing different folks. An app like this actually feeds into insecurities and distrust.”On the similar time, surveillance and casual snitching have turn out to be normalized within the strategy of discovering (or perhaps simply eliminating) a possible associate. Individuals recurrently submit their unfavorable 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 wrongdoer’s identify and turning them into infamous figures.A dishy posture is frequent 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 identified, the 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 and marketing feels a bit odd and inconsistent. It implies a degree of frivolousness. Moreover, a picture on Tea’s web site exhibits one girl whispering to a different girl, who has a shocked — not precisely distressed — expression on her face.Equally, the app’s use of “purple flags” to indicate behaviors that will compromise a lady’s security has been equally problematic, given how loosely the time period is used on-line. A purple flag might imply something from stalking conduct, emotional abuse and manipulation, and bodily hazard to a person not texting again by a sure time. How, precisely, ought to customers determine what sort of conduct warrants itemizing? How expansive ought to a purple flag be? Isn’t it an issue if it may possibly embody the whole lot from severe bodily abuse to common, human errors?Issues turn out to be much more unreliable with the app’s prison background checks. Consultants have traditionally criticized all these screenings on courting apps, like Tinder, explaining that gendered violence is usually unreported. In consequence, abusers aren’t typically interacting with the prison justice system. App customers are shopping for into an thought of safety which may be little greater than a mirage.The issue with promoting a whisper networkIn 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 may be antithetical to the targets and methods of client capitalism.An organization that “gender washes,” or leverages feminism for advertising and marketing, would possibly properly maintain equality as a real objective, says Natasha Mulvihill, an affiliate professor of criminology on the College of Bristol. However, she explains, “revenue and advertising and marketing logics can imply these goals turn out to be distorted, contradictory, and doubtlessly dangerous.”The distortion right here is apparent within the advertising and marketing: to unfold broadly and accumulate customers, the app has to current a severe challenge as enjoyable, gentle, gameable — the same expertise as swiping by Tinder, for instance. Tea shouldn’t be alone on this; Lulu shared lots of the similar issues. Kicky advertising and marketing and free, user-driven definitions of unhealthy conduct make the app extra interesting, whilst they obscure the gravity of the central concern.In addition they take away the context and circumstances that beget whisper networks within the first place. A 2023 examine, surveying ladies between the ages of 18 and 64, discovered that whisper networks helped “individuals make sense of their experiences and discover assist” in workplaces the place “sexual harassment shouldn’t be taken critically, and reporting sexual harassment is dangerous.” On an app utilized by thousands and thousands of strangers, the solidarity you might need with a colleague coping with the identical creepy boss, and even the inherent belief you’d have with a pal warning you a few sketchy man, is lacking. The one factor that unites the customers is their heterosexual womanhood, leaving a number of house for various experiences, views, and intentions.Catherine Falls Industrial/Getty Photos“There isn’t any assure that the data you might be receiving is nice info 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 damage earlier than?”The premise appears partly primarily based on a notion that’s been steadily disputed in a post-girlboss tradition — that girls, just by advantage of being ladies, are at all times searching for one another’s greatest pursuits.There are even deeper contradictions, too: Whereas Tea intends to foster group amongst ladies, it additionally implies that their publicity to harmful males is one thing they’ll personally handle.Mulvihill says Tea purports a “neoliberal” thought of ladies’s security as an “particular person challenge of danger administration,” versus a “social and public coverage challenge that everybody have to be engaged in.”“On the floor, this seems to be to be creating ‘group’ and ‘security in numbers,’ however paradoxically, danger administration approaches can result in responsibilizing particular person ladies for managing males’s violence,” she says. “If they’re harmed, then they could really feel they ‘must have recognized higher’ or ‘must have managed the danger higher.’”Moreover, information shouldn’t be at all times a dependable protection in opposition to violence or different dangerous conduct. Mulvihill relates this challenge again to “purple flags” discourse on-line in her 2025 examine known as “The New Consultants of On-line Courting: Feminism, Recommendation, and Hurt” on Instagram, co-authored with Joanna Giant: “efforts at consciousness-raising and schooling are vital, however it is crucial additionally to acknowledge that ‘realizing’ shouldn’t be sufficient.”These overarching issues — that info, even when it’s correct and reliable, can seemingly by no means be full, and worse, that even excellent information 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 ladies who face repercussions for wanting to interact with these assets, 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 strategies for apps that will ridicule and humiliate ladies. Regulation corporations are issuing steering on how males who’ve been posted about on the app can legally retaliate.If the Tea app completed something, it confirmed that girls’s experiences with misogyny can’t be solved with a client product, and sisterhood can’t be offered at scale. If ladies might shield themselves by scrolling their telephones, wouldn’t we now have found it already?