The Tea app describes itself as "the safest place to spill tea" about potential online matches, allowing its subscribers to conduct background and criminal record checks, reverse image searches, and communicate anonymously among one another about men posted on the app.
But the revelation last month of personal data being hacked and leaked online threatened the personal safety of the women on the popular app and laid bare the anonymous, one-sided accusations against the men in their dating pools. It also put a spotlight on the flaws in such "whisper networks," which gained prominence in the Me Too era.
Tea suffered a major data breach, revealing users' drivers' licenses, direct messages, selfies and other sensitive information.
The team at Tea discovered the initial breach in the evening hours of July 25. As first reported by 404 Media, users on the notorious message board 4chan got a hold of users' sensitive data — including government IDs, which had at one point been used as a verification tool by the app — and leaked it elsewhere online.
"As part of our ongoing investigation into the cybersecurity incident involving the Tea App, we learned that some direct messages (DMs) were accessed as part of the initial incident," a representative for the company told NPR.
"Out of an abundance of caution, we have taken the affected system offline. At this time, we have found no evidence of access to other parts of our environment."
The company said only users who signed up prior to February 2024 were affected.
Online trolls also claimed to have sourced the metadata included in the photos and used it to make a map of Tea subscribers' locations.
The company, which boasts of more than 6.2 million women users, faces two class action lawsuits filed in California in response to the breach.
Whisper networks for women's safety
Tea is hardly the first system to have attempted to harvest the power of gossip and leverage it to make dating safer.
On Facebook, there are several groups dedicated regionally to helping women determine if they're dating the same guy and to assess the character of the men splashed across the pages.
At the height of the Me Too movement, industry-specific Google Docs sourced anonymous complaints against men alleged to have behaved inappropriately towards their colleagues.
Experts say that networks of women quietly sharing information between themselves in the workplace or on college campuses helps sound the alarm on abusers, while keeping the accusers from facing potential retaliation from the accused.
"The term whisper network kind of came into play in the general public consciousness in 2017 when we were hearing about the trial of Harvey Weinstein and Me Too," said Carrie Ann Johnson, assistant teaching professor in Women's and Gender Studies at Iowa State University. But, she said, these informal communication networks have existed among women for ages.
Johnson has written about the complicated nature of whisper networks and the importance they can play among women in environments where sexual harassment might occur.
But when these networks go digital, Johnson said, they run the risk of losing elements of what make real-world communications so effective.
"When it moves to an app, I think we end up having more problems, largely due to the language of whisper networks, which is often a little bit coded," Johnson said.
"Even some of the nuances of what you would need in a whisper network just gets lost in translation," she said. "But also people constantly calibrate the trustworthiness of the information they're hearing, but when it is moved online, you can't hear anything behind the story."
From gossip to "online mob behavior"
And what happens digitally can have severe real-world consequences.
Critics have long complained that the anonymity of these sources can lead to bad-faith accusations. When unchecked allegations like the ones able to be made by Tea users hit a certain audience, they can attract throngs of people ready to publicly shame the individual at the other end of the claim.
"Any of these things, when you're talking about what are essentially forms of gossip, have the potential themselves to also be sources of harm. And we see that kind of online mob behavior happen again and again," said Emily Laidlaw, an associate professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on cybersecurity law.
Laidlaw has written about the pitfalls of public shaming and people's right to privacy online. She said that whisper networks like the Tea app are usually well-intentioned but that the broad, unchecked dissemination of critical information can often become toxic.
"I think that there's a broader question really that's about civility and about how we engage with each other," she said.
And both the accused and the accuser can be harmed.
When the Tea app breach occurred, social media users relished in mocking and threatening the safety of the women whose personal information had been leaked.
"Create a male version of the app using the database," one social media user wrote. "Escalate this sh**."
Meanwhile, there have been several lawsuits filed by men named in these sort of public online forums who say that they suffered as a result.
In one notable example, a public, anonymous Google Doc about men in the media industry accused of sexual misconduct, resulted in the originator of the list settling on a six-figure sum after one of the men sued her for defamation.
"People often go into these spaces and they start sharing information back and forth, and what might start out as something that might seem valuable becomes a way of just fueling harm," Laidlaw said.
"And it has such a tremendous impact in a way that it might not when you're all sitting around in the pub having a conversation about this guy you just went out on a date with last week," she said.
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