Tea was doomed from the start

There’s not an app for this.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

Over the weekend, the second screen time diaries went live. Follow my phone around Mexico City, and stay tuned for a haul at the end!—Kate

Screen time diaries: Mexico City

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In 2017, as the #MeToo movement crashed through Hollywood and onto Twitter, the term “whisper network” was launched back into the zeitgeist. Harvey Weinstein’s behavior, it was said, was an open secret in Hollywood. Unable to stop it, women instead tried to keep each other safe through word-of-mouth warnings. Once Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s New York Times exposé turned up the volume, other industries were inspired to direct the same scrutiny towards their own communities (remember the Shitty Media Men spreadsheet?).

This, seemingly, was the idea behind Tea, which shot to number one on Apple’s “lifestyle” app chart last week. Part Shitty Media Men list, part are-we-dating-the-same-guy Facebook group, women are encouraged to use the app—founded in 2023, and marketed as a kind of Yelp for men—to crowdsource feedback about the men they’re dating or interested in to see if anyone knows of any “red flags.” It was, speaking of red flags, was created by a man.

My complex feelings about West Elm Caleb

Most of my thoughts about the morality of this kind of flattened, crowd-sourced “accountability” can be found in my West Elm Caleb piece, and I think

Magdalene J. Taylor

summarizes the problem with the app perfectly:

“Some fear of embarrassment, or even fear in general, is warranted. What’s most insidious about Tea is that it banks on this without differentiation. Men who hit women are posted alongside guys who went through a shitty breakup with their high school girlfriend a decade ago, or guys who have yet to even be accused of having any “red flags.” Here again, a blanket antagonism is being fostered, one that could potentially obfuscate the boundaries of actual bad behavior. We as women are not any safer for it.”

And now, women are even less safe. The app, which requires users to submit their ID and a selfie to verify that they are women (in and of itself problematic), was breached on Friday after irate 4Chan users managed to gain access to 72,000 of those images and documents. To promise women a tool to protect themselves, however flawed, while leaving them vulnerable to one of the most hateful, sexist, dangerous communities on the internet is nothing short of abhorrent. It’s also not surprising. The same way we can’t trust tech companies to innovate away loneliness, we can’t trust them to innovate safety, either.