Helpful safety tool or harmful reputation ruiner?
What is it?
The Tea app launched in 2023 and is marketed as a dating safety app for women. It is currently number one on the apple app store for lifestyle apps. It has built in features to run background checks, reverse image searches, a sex offender map and criminal record searches and court search results.
A chat page opens with polls and discussions for women to inquire about dating advice. In addition to these features, its primary page opens to what the app promotes as “yelp for men.”
According to their app store page, “Tea was built for one mission: helping women date safely. For too long, women’s safety has been an afterthought in dating – we’re changing that.”
The front page has photos of men in the surrounding area with the option to add ‘red flags’ or ‘green flags’ to their cup based on the user’s experience with them. These flags come with comments on the men’s behavior.
To download this app, one must take a selfie that is sent to the app so they can verify that the user is a woman. This app claims this photo is deleted once the user is verified and from that point on, the entire app is anonymous.
The basic app is free but to use the features such as unlimited searches, the user must get friends to sign up for the app or pay for use. Without paying more, users are limited to five searches a month. The app also incentivizes users posting men in exchange for limited access to premium.
According to the app developer’s webpage, 10 percent of profits generated from the app are donated to the National Domestic Violence Hotline.
With skyrocketing success, it was only a matter of time before the Tea app began being used on the UW campus.
There are gender equivalents, but they have not reached the same popularity.
Campus Perspectives
The UW campus features a range of perspectives on the tea app, from those who have the app, to those who have been posted to the app and people who lie in between. Students like Elle Ortner and Annalise Hubbard had just heard about it via Instagram Reels. Some like senior Pierce Thompson had never heard of it at all.
“I don’t know about concerned, but I guess curious, more than anything,” said Thompson. “I’ve never heard of it. I’ll definitely look into it.”
“I heard about it on Yik Yak, I saw people debating about whether or not it was good,” said Sophomore Ella Goodman.
Goodman has never downloaded the app but can see why people would.
“I understand people’s concerns about harassment and cyberbullying, but I think it makes sense for women to want to be safe and know the men they’re getting involved with,” she said.
Meredith Schulz, a freshman who has the Tea app, agrees with this sentiment.
“It can be positive in that you can find out if your partner is being sneaky behind your back, but it’s also negative because you never know if someone’s just praying on your downfall,” Schulz said.
Schulz doesn’t recommend the app to everyone and warns that it could cause issues in relationships. She also understands why some are nervous about being posted to the app.
“Honestly there’s a lot of negative and bad things posted on there,” she said.
Schulz says there’s a lot of people from our campus on the app.
“I think it just needs to be gone. I don’t know, guys don’t go lying about girls and I don’t think girls should go around lying about guys,” said freshman Calen Reyna who found out from a friend that he was posted on the app.
“I was really scared. I didn’t know what there were saying, and obviously, I can’t get in because I’m a guy, but I was really worried about what they were going to say and then she said I had two red flags, and I was like “dang, girls think I’m a red flag.”’
Reyna said he could understand that the app could be helpful when true things were posted but said he was concerned about slander. He also said he was aware of the version for men but doesn’t believe it is as popular as, “men are less petty, and they just wouldn’t really care about that.”
The legality
Tea has a lot of legal ground to stand on. Men are likely not going to sue the app for invasion of privacy as most photos posted on Tea were posted somewhere else first. Once an image is posted online, the photographer signs off the use of that photo to the app. This makes it harder to challenge the dissemination of these photos according to CNN’s legal analyst Eliot Williams.
Due to the nature of the internet, plenty of images are likely circulating of nearly all of us that we do not own. Those who take these photos are allowed to use them in nearly any context other than for advertisement.
In terms of defamation, the Tea app is also largely protected here. Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act treats social media platforms more like libraries than books. Which is to say, they are a platform for publishing, not the publishers of the content and are therefore protected from any criminal action that may be taken on their app.
A case against users for defamation may also be difficult. Defamation is a public and false statement about an identifiable person, presented as fact, that causes damages. The posts on Tea meet all these requirements but crucially; to prove defamation, these claims must be made with negligence. This, in addition with the truth of the claims can be very hard to prove.
Date Breech
In July 2025, the selfies and addresses of many of the women who had signed up were leaked in a data breach.
According to the BBC, this leaked data was seized by misogynist groups online and the images were posted to websites for critiques.
This caused distrust of the app, but it is still very popular on the app page.
The Current State of the Internet
The tea app is concerning to many, but the cat cannot be easily put back into the bag. The tea app may just be the next step in the progression of online dating culture.
