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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.
When thinking about this issues, I always try to find some old time equivalent and how would it go. For instance in the past would it be legal to make an advertisement in local news that next Tuesday there will be a meeting in a local club where anybody can discuss John Smith on the photo? Then you will have 20 people attending, drinking beer and talking shit about John. Is this something that you would consider as libel and prosecute local newspaper who printed such an advert? What if the advert was just printed paper that some person threw into mailboxes of the neighborhood? Is it some sort of punishable activity?
Now I understand that there is a difference in scale between digital and paper media, but I am still quite perplexed how quickly people bow to authoritarian powers if it is related to internet. For instance privacy of correspondence is a human right under article 12 of UN declaration of human rights. But apparently email and chat communication is arbitrarily not part of it. The same here - talking shit about somebody with friends in a pub is absolutely something that is normal human experience for millennia. But suddenly talking shit on the internet is some sort of punishable evil?
There is something that rubs me the wrong way, mostly that normalizing these heavy handed approaches may quickly turn from digital world to meat world.
In the "are we dating the same guy" case the old time equivalent is that enough people know each other, and talk to each other often enough, that someone will see your Jack out at a bar across town with some girl who isn't you and if they don't tell you they'll tell someone who will tell someone who will tell you.
Or in the case of "Tom's a serial date rapist," the old time equivalent is that you heard a rumor that Tom and Susie were parking up at the lookout and no one quite knows what happened but Susie missed school the next day and they stopped talking so it must have been something bad, because Susie was wearing Tommy's class ring all the time and she stopped right away.
The way you achieve something like this today is by trying to build a dense community around yourself, have lots of friends, talk to them a lot, and date only other people from within that community who also have lots of friends they talk to a lot.
There's also the problem of enough women being dumb enough to date guys who are waving an entire Chinese National Day display of red flags, but staunchly refuse to believe guy is gong to beat the crap out of them or that it's just his crazy, jealous, obsessed ex going around bad-mouthing poor innocent guy (I remember reading an account of a court case where a guy was credibly accused and convicted of being abusive to his ex, and his current girlfriend turned up to be a character witness for him. If you're at a trial for your snuggle-bunny beating the crap out of his last girl friend, what the hell are you doing?)
So there probably is a good opening for "am I dating Mr/Ms Crazy or Mr/Ms Cheater?" website to check out "I met this guy/gal online and I have some doubts, am I over-reacting?" but we can't have nice things because this is the modern Internet. (Yeah, women are crazy violent stalkers too).
Presumably, believing that she's lying or crazy.
I feel like I usually see "he's perfect and would never do that to me" +/- "except for that one/fortieth time" in the early stages with later stages being even more awful than that.
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