As the saying goes, the dildo of consequences rarely comes lubed. Thousands of women exploited an app to secretly doxx, defame and belittle men.
Now, they’re screeching like banshees because they’ve been exposed, and subjected to a good ol’, heapin’ helpin’ of their own medicine.
A once-empowering app designed to protect women from catfishers, criminals and creeps has turned into a privacy nightmare.
A “privacy nightmare”, whine the women who violated the privacy of thousands of men with all the vicious cattiness of a high-school gossip circle.
Tea Dating Advice, the female-only app that soared to popularity this July thanks to TikTok, was hailed a game-changer in identifying dodgy men and enabling women to “swipe safely.”
What it in fact was, was yet another means for women to bully and belittle other people, all the while expecting they’d never face accountability.
The Yelp-style platform grants women access to a forum where they can post anonymous ratings of men they’re seeing and ask other women for “tea” – aka gossip/dirt.
Think of it like writing a scathing review of that regretful Tinder date you went on with the foot-fetish guy, or simply venting about your ex.
In other words, cyber-bullying, but the victim isn’t even aware of it. Imagine, after all, a site that allowed men to secretly rate women. Mark Zuckerberg was in fact hit with disciplinary action and forced to apologise, while at Harvard, for setting up just such a platform. And, as fictionalised in The Social Network, the girls did not like it one bit.
At least some people got it:
Youth and pop culture magazine Dazed argued that the app’s model teeters on “digital vigilantism”, allowing women to post photos of men without their consent, raising serious privacy questions.
But these cyber-bullies who didn’t care about about men’s privacy are getting a hard lesson in accountability.
Last Friday, the company confirmed it suffered “unauthorised access to an archived data system”, exposing roughly 72,000 user-submitted images.
13,000 selfies and photo IDs used for verification, plus 59,000 images from posts, comments and direct messages dating back over two years.
Those who live by the cyber-bullying…
The funniest part is that the site wasn’t even ‘hacked’. Instead, a 4chan user simply took advantage of lazy, poor coding and accessed a database left open for anyone to ferret through.
While Tea was celebrating two million new users, an anonymous 4chan user posted a database of photos, including location-tied data and even a map – which sparked heated discussion across X and Facebook. These posts have since been removed.
Well, women claimed they wanted to dodge dating bullets – now, men are getting the same opportunity.
And the bitchy girls don’t like it. Not one bit.
