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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.
Currently available in the German Google Play store, along with at least half a dozen copycats. Most of the latter are aimed at men, one is unisex.
If European law was ever actually enforced, the entire continent would grind to a halt.
They enjoy selectively enforcing it to fine American tech companies billions. I consider that obvious parasitism. They can't compete with American tech, but they can siphon off value and assert that they are the regulatory leader of something they are incapable of making themselves. They're already proudly stating they will be the global regulatory leader for AI also. I'm sure the American and Chinese researchers are thrilled.
"Can't compete with American tech like Facebook".
Russia has Facebook. It's not difficult tech. Europeans, being a conquered and occupied population didn't have the balls to be like China and Russia and bar foreign social networks.
Sure, you can rather trivially copy American social media and phone apps. I've been to China a number of times and they did just that. American apps are banned. Equivalent Chinese apps are available for download if you have a Chinese mainland phone number and bank account.
There are European search engines. They collectively enjoy single digit percentage of European searches while American search engines take the other nearly 100%. Someday there will be commonly used American AI and EU regulators leeching a bit of value from them in the form of fines. There will be some combination of none or deeply unpopular European AI that approximately no one would voluntarily use as an alternative to American tech.
Chinese had the right approach. There's nothing to gain by allowing someone else to run social networks with the participation of your citizens. Europeans allowed it because they act like thralls of Americans, and that's because that's what they are.
They'd have to really commit to it. It takes one click to turn on a VPN with an exit node in the US. There'd have to be a Great European Firewall.
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