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It looks like the Tea app has been pulled from the Apple store. The linked article has a strong bias supporting the existance of this app, but was it a good idea to have this app?
This app is/was, if you ask someone in the blue tribe about it, a safety app to keep women safe. If you ask someone in the red tribe about the app, they will say that men were not allowed to use the app, that the app was used to spread slander about men which the men were not allowed to see, much less respond to (often times female friends of a guy being slandered would let him know what’s going on).
As a lot of readers here probably know, earlier this summer, pictures of some Tea app users were leaked online causing those pictures to be widely shared, including in a torrent file. Someone even briefly had a web app up where people could rate pictures of Tea app users. The blue tribe thought it was a violation of privacy to do that; the red tribe responded by saying that the entire purpose of the Tea app was to violate the privacy of men.
The app was only available in the US; while it was arguably legal there, they didn’t even try to make it available in Europe, where it probably would not had been legal because Europe has much stronger data privacy laws than the US.
For myself, having had a close friend who was slandered in a similar Facebook group, I can not be neutral about this app being pulled from the Apple store: It harmed a lot of men, innocent men in many cases, and the world, in my opinion, is a better place when we don’t let men be slandered this way.
This kind of thing makes me realize that I lived through the best part of the internet. Or at least the best part of one version of the internet. We're living in a dark age or a transitional age, but clearly the worst of times.
There was a time when a teenager could post on Facebook under your real name with no consequences, because there were no adults there. My high school debate team legitimately had a question as to whether posts on Facebook could, not should but could, be considered by colleges when making admissions decisions. You posted under your real government name, dirty jokes and bitching about teachers and gossip, and no one ever did a thing to you. There was a time when girls on Snapchat would just send out pictures of their tits to everyone they knew, with a quippy caption like "Merry Christmas ya filthy animals;" a tradition whose origin I never understood but the action of which I enjoyed. /r/GoneWild used to be understood to be entirely amateurs doing it purely for attention, just like the Girls Gone Wild series was understood to provide nothing but a T Shirt to the girls. And of course none of this would ever really come back to bite those girls in real life, no one was putting in any effort to connect the act to real life.
There was a time when you could just hit on girls on Facebook. If you had a few mutual friends, she'd accept your friend request and chat with you on the assumption you were cool. Just being on Facebook made you cool for a while, I was in high school the years you needed to be invited by a friend, who must at that time have been in college. It was like those stories about whaling ships landing on islands where giant sea turtles could be plucked off the beach and cooked, with no natural defenses from a lack of experience of predators.
And there was a time when it was super easy to lie on the internet. Most dating apps didn't connect to "real name" social media as a default until Tinder, and reverse image search was in its infancy, if you were in a different geographic location than where you lived or just in a sufficiently dense market there was no practical way to connect a profile under a fake name to your real life identity. Hell, for a few years girlfriends routinely fell for the "someone made a fake profile of me" line!
Now everything you do is on a tightrope. One mistake and you're doomed. Everything is public and everything is connected. You can't assume that anything you say is private unless it's encrypted, on a false name with elaborate efforts to obscure your identity behind false details, and even then you might get got if you aren't careful.
It used to be that the internet could never hurt you. Now it seems that it can only hurt you
Dan Savage used to predict that we would reach a point where such a critical mass of people had engaged in sexting that the scandal would no longer attach, because everyone had done it, so we couldn't disqualify politicians for dick pics because everyone had one. We seem to have reached that critical mass for everyone having some internet controversy, but rather than lightening the consequences we've harshened them. I would say that such a system would have no future, that it must change, but then we see things like the drinking age, where the vast majority of people drink before 21 but we just keep punishing kids for no reason. Our society is capable of punishing people at random for a long, long time.
Right, but this is why people started demanding that everything be public and making awful apps like Tea. The time before banking regulations used to be great for speculators but it was terrible for everyone else, which is why we now have banking regulations. "You used to be able to get away with anything" is usually going to be said in the past sense because the majority of people do not see this as a positive. It's no different from the glory days of Soho, 1960s mixed-sex accommodation, or Sodom. These things don't last because they aren't good for the majority of people.
But most people haven't done it, and they think that the people sending dick pics are animals.
Partly because it's not actually everyone, but also because they're different controversies. Mr. "I once shagged my dog" is not going to be any more approving of "I think Hitler made a lot of good points", and vice versa.
Yeah, no. Aziz Ansari didn't shag a dog, and Maya Forstater didn't praise Hitler, and I know that you know that. I know we all wish we lived back in the times when everything was sane, but let's be honest about what time it is.
Er, no, I was just making those up to point out that there are entirely different categories of scandals and people who do 'Forbidden Thing Category A' may have lots of patience for other 'A' enjoyers whilst advocating zero tolerance for 'Forbidden Thing Category B'.
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