It sounds like the plot of a Black Mirror episode. Single, straight women log into a dating app, but not to meet men. Instead, they can screen local guys, using photos and user-reported “red flags.” The app is designed to make the experience of finding a partner less risky, but it quickly culminates in disaster.
This is already the trajectory of the Tea app, which experienced a recent surge in popularity. It reached No. 1 on the Top Free Apps chart late last month in the App Store and remains in the top 10. The app currently boasts over 6 million users, per its website. Exclusively designed for women, the “dating safety tool” is a cross between safety network Citizen and review hub Yelp, allowing users to post anonymous reviews of men, reverse image-search their photos, and run background checks. Some of these features are paywalled, including unlimited searches for $15 a month. Its founder, Sean Cook, a former Salesforce product manager, created the app in 2023 after witnessing his mother’s “terrifying experience with online dating,” from being catfished to unknowingly meeting men with criminal records.
Predictably, a review app for human beings has not been universally popular, drawing criticism from both men who feared having their information posted online and experts who identified serious privacy and defamation concerns, both in and out of the app.
While Tea prohibits screenshots, TikTok users have managed to post their screens while scrolling through the app. Men, whether through word-of-mouth or accessing the app themselves, have also been able to see and respond to their reviews. In addition to collecting data to potentially share with advertisers, Tea’s privacy policy states that the company may share users’ information to “respond to lawful requests and legal processes.” As reporter Amanda Hoover wrote for Business Insider, this caveat “could open women who think they’re posting in good faith to defamation suits by disgruntled men whose reputations suffer by what has been posted about them, even if it’s accurate.” It was almost too predictable when Tea reported a cyberattack on July 25 that exposed users’ personal information, direct messages, and selfies. As a result, its messaging function has been suspended.
Ultimately, the “name and shame” premise of the app has drawn the most controversy online, including some bad-faith takes. It’s the sort of panic and debate that occurred when the “Shitty Media Men” spreadsheet leaked in 2017 and following the launch of the now-shuttered dating app Lulu in 2014, which crowdsourced information about men in a similar way as Tea.
While there are, as Cook’s reasons for creating the app imply, serious and justifiable reasons why women who date men online might seek to protect themself by learning more about the guys they meet, arguably, an app like Tea is problematic. The biggest issue is that a commercially available app misunderstands the value, as well as the limits, of whisper networks in keeping women safe. While these resources have proven to be necessary in workplaces and the wider social world, they become a lot more complicated and misused once they’re commodified.
The dating world is rough, in ways big and small
It’s easy to read Tea as a cynical attempt to capitalize on the distraught and dystopian landscape of dating right now.
“Men and women are approaching dating assuming that other people are out to mislead them,” relationship expert Rachel Vanderbilt says. “This includes what they’re looking for in a relationship, what their values are, or whether they are seeing other people. An app like this really feeds into insecurities and mistrust.”
At the same time, surveillance and informal snitching have become normalized in the process of finding (or maybe just eliminating) a potential partner. People regularly post their negative or simply awkward communications on dating apps like Hinge for their followers to dissect. A large swath of storytime videos on TikTok are dedicated to users discussing bad dating experiences, sometimes revealing the culprit’s name and turning them into notorious figures.
A dishy posture is common in this realm, and Tea made the choice to capitalize on that by having a name that’s queer slang for gossip. As one TikTok user pointed out, the fact that the dating safety app, which donates a portion of its profits to the National Domestic Abuse Hotline, uses such salacious marketing feels a bit odd and inconsistent. It implies a level of frivolousness. Additionally, an image on Tea’s website shows one woman whispering to another woman, who has a shocked — not exactly distressed — expression on her face.
Similarly, the app’s use of “red flags” to denote behaviors that would compromise a woman’s safety has been equally problematic, given how loosely the term is used online. A red flag could mean anything from stalking behavior, emotional abuse and manipulation, and physical danger to a man not texting back by a certain time. How, exactly, should users decide what kind of behavior warrants listing? How expansive should a red flag be? Isn’t it a problem if it can encompass everything from serious physical abuse to regular, human mistakes?
Things become even more unreliable with the app’s criminal background checks. Experts have historically criticized these types of screenings on dating apps, like Tinder, explaining that gendered violence is often unreported. As a result, abusers aren’t often interacting with the criminal justice system. App users are buying into an idea of security that may be little more than a mirage.
The problem with selling a whisper network
In many ways, Tea is specifically a poorly made product. Still, the broader failure of apps of its type, despite the demand, demonstrates how tackling social issues like gendered violence can be antithetical to the goals and strategies of consumer capitalism.
A company that “gender washes,” or leverages feminism for marketing, might well hold equality as a true goal, says Natasha Mulvihill, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Bristol. But, she explains, “profit and marketing logics can mean these aims become distorted, contradictory, and potentially harmful.”
The distortion here is obvious in the marketing: to spread widely and collect users, the app has to present a serious issue as fun, light, gameable — a similar experience as swiping through Tinder, for example. Tea is not alone in this; Lulu shared many of the same problems. Kicky marketing and loose, user-driven definitions of bad behavior make the app more appealing, even as they obscure the gravity of the central concern.
They also remove the context and conditions that beget whisper networks in the first place. A 2023 study, surveying women between the ages of 18 and 64, found that whisper networks helped “participants make sense of their experiences and find support” in workplaces where “sexual harassment is not taken seriously, and reporting sexual harassment is risky.” On an app used by millions of strangers, the solidarity you might have with a colleague dealing with the same creepy boss, or even the inherent trust you’d have with a friend warning you about a sketchy guy, is missing. The only thing that unites the users is their heterosexual womanhood, leaving lots of space for different experiences, perspectives, and intentions.
“There is no guarantee that the information you are receiving is good information or is truthful,” Vanderbilt says. “Are you getting genuine advice from someone who has good intentions, or are you getting vindictive advice from someone who has been hurt before?”
The premise seems partly based on a notion that’s been frequently disputed in a post-girlboss culture — that women, simply by virtue of being women, are always looking out for each other’s best interests.
There are even deeper contradictions, too: While Tea intends to foster community among women, it also implies that their exposure to dangerous men is something they can personally manage.
Mulvihill says Tea purports a “neoliberal” idea of women’s safety as an “individual issue of risk management,” as opposed to a “social and public policy issue that everyone must be engaged in.”
“On the surface, this looks to be creating ‘community’ and ‘safety in numbers,’ but paradoxically, risk management approaches can lead to responsibilizing individual women for managing men’s violence,” she says. “If they are harmed, then they might feel they ‘ought to have known better’ or ‘ought to have managed the risk better.’”
Additionally, knowledge is not always a reliable defense against violence or other harmful behavior. Mulvihill relates this issue back to “red flags” discourse online in her 2025 study called “The New Experts of Online Dating: Feminism, Advice, and Harm” on Instagram, co-authored with Joanna Large: “efforts at consciousness-raising and education are necessary, but it is important also to recognize that ‘knowing’ is not enough.”
These overarching problems — that information, even when it’s accurate and trustworthy, can likely never be complete, and worse, that even perfect knowledge still may not be enough power — are inherent to all whisper networks. It’s just that much more complicated when there’s a company, not your colleague, fostering the murmurs.
Inevitably, it’s women who face repercussions for wanting to engage with these resources, whether it’s apps like Tea or spreadsheets about problematic men, when they backfire. Already, disgruntled men online have countered the Tea app with suggestions for apps that would ridicule and humiliate women. Law firms are issuing guidance on how men who have been posted about on the app can legally retaliate.
If the Tea app accomplished anything, it showed that women’s experiences with misogyny can’t be solved with a consumer product, and sisterhood can’t be sold at scale. If women could protect themselves by scrolling their phones, wouldn’t we have discovered it already?