It’s heartbreaking to see the way social division is manufactured at the expense of our generation, sowing isolation and hostility into nearly every aspect of our relations with other people.
It’s now abundantly clear, thanks to apps like Tea Dating Advice and TeaOnHer, that we’re eating our young.
Thousands of users’ personal data were compromised in data breaches of both apps. Over 70,000 images from the Tea app were leaked and posted to the message board 4chan, revealing selfies and IDs of users intended only for verification purposes. Security flaws were found in the TeaOnHer app as well, allowing anyone access to users’ personal data.
This is only the tip of the iceberg.
The mere existence of these apps is emblematic of the cultural battles we’re facing right now, namely the conflation of personhood and branding alongside the ongoing gender war. Men and women are being pitted against each other.
The real world is becoming more and more amalgamated with the online world in unprecedented ways.
These apps are incentivizing our worst impulses, intensified by the guise of anonymity, while leaving an indomitable paper trail of users’ actions and personal data.
It’s not even that online actions have consequences, which we should all know by now. It’s that large swaths of the internet, and especially apps like these, are intentionally constructed to bring out the worst in people.
These social networks are not created with our best interests in mind, and they manufacture even more social division in an already fraught time for gender relations.
People tend to be bolder when they won’t be attached to what they’re saying or doing. This is extremely dangerous in a space where someone, or something, is always watching, dictating and preserving people’s actions.
University of Minnesota mass communications professor Stacie Swenson said anonymity allows people online to let their guards down.
“Consequences don’t, and can’t, always apply if you’re anonymous,” Swenson said. “Societal norms and that sort of thing can be subverted if you’re anonymous.”
The Tea app was supposed to make other women aware of potential predators or other unsavory individuals on dating apps in their area through its network-like interface. Tea allowed users to be anonymous while posting men’s dating profiles and names, giving women free rein to post anything seemingly without identification.
Supposedly drawing on the age-old tradition of women’s word of mouth and gossip as a tool for resistance against men with ill intentions, the idea itself, while not without risks, was at least attempting to solve a real problem.
Sexual assaults are rarely reported or prosecuted, and it is valiant to want to protect one’s community from danger.
These apps do more harm than good.
University media law professor Christopher Terry said users are not protected from potential libel suits.
“The website, the Tea site itself, is absolutely protected from the content that you post because of Section 230,” Terry said. “But you have absolutely no protection if you say something that is false and defamatory.”
It’s essentially an app for libel when placed in the wrong hands, and given that there is no way to ensure whose hands it’s in due to its anonymous format, it’s not only flat-out ineffective, but also counterintuitive.
The TeaOnHer app is a platform for men to detail the various encounters and experiences they’ve had with women from dating apps, often in a transactional manner. It purports to be a safety app for men in the same vein as its predecessor, yet it demeans and berates women far more than it raises legitimate concerns or grievances.
It’s vengeful and nasty, to say the least. The online dating scene has become a never-ending game of one-upsmanship, with real stakes for real people.
This isn’t the kind of dating game anybody wants to play.
They encourage the dehumanization of men and women online, causing us to treat others in a way similar to brands or companies and boil ourselves down in an effort to create profiles and market ourselves. It doesn’t get more transactional or soulless.
It’s a molding of the 3D into the 2D, in that we lose the full picture in this translation from the real world into the internet, leading us all to try to become our own personal brands.
Terry said these dating feedback apps mimic popular pre-existing app and website formats.
“It’s Yelp for dating, really, when you think about it,” Terry said. “How many times have you read a Yelp review and it does not reflect your own experience with an establishment?”
It’s as if one person on the apps becomes a brand, while the other retains their humanity by remaining anonymous.
This Tea app fiasco revealed there are no real people online, only brands and products. To be a person online is to either relinquish your identity through remaining anonymous or to keep your identity and lose your humanity.
We’re being told to value dating and human connection for its transactional nature, essentially rating it to our own satisfaction. Regardless of the intent behind posting a person’s profile, users aren’t talking about a person, but a product. They aren’t describing people they have or haven’t met, but products or services that need to be optimized.
There are helpful Yelp reviews that warn potential customers of danger or bad business practices, and there are some that flat-out lie.
People shouldn’t be brands, and these apps shouldn’t exist.
This is not vigilante justice, nor does it help anyone in the long run. The only way to make this type of app less harmful would be to take it with a grain of salt.
This is made nearly impossible when one’s name and face are attached to a site that makes outrageous, if not defamatory, claims about personal dealings.
This type of honor system is untenable. Now, we don’t know what to believe.