We Should Be Learning Serious Lessons From the Tea App
A full version of my newsletter thoughts on the dumbest app ever.
There’s a real lesson to be learned from the catastrophic fall of the Tea app.
For those of you not terminally online (or on the app), Tea is an app that allows women to post general thoughts, reviews, and anonymously shared stories about men that they’ve dated to an online forum that is, at least ostensibly, only inhabited by other women. Formed in 2023 by former Salesforce director Sean Cook from the Bay Area (in response to his mother’s harrowing experiences with online dating), the app recently saw a massive surge in popularity, becoming one of the top apps on Apple’s App Store in recent weeks.
And then the dam broke.
On July 25, the app experienced a major data breach, affecting people who registered before February 2024 (so the users behind the recent wave of popularity likely weren’t affected). The following amounts of user data were essentially flung out to open Internet forums like 4chan: 3,000 selfies and photo IDs from Tea’s user verification processes (including driver’s licenses), 59,000 images from public posts, comments, and direct messages within the app, and around 60 GB of data.
Data breaches are terrible – but it’s especially difficult when they occur on a platform like Tea that’s directly designed to build a community for people united by perceptions of (and sometimes, very real) vulnerability. Chris Groshong pointed this out at Forbes:
“Tea marketed itself as a safe space where people could share vulnerable experiences without fear of retaliation. That trust was supposed to be a feature, not a liability. But in exposing the identities of people who likely signed up for the app under the promise of anonymity, the breach reversed the app’s core mission … Trust was broken, and it was trust the platform had sold as its core value.”
Leave aside all the tech questions about vibe-coding, Web2, and online privacy for a second and think about that. How accurate is it to say that a platform largely built on anonymity (as a means to protect the vulnerable) is built on … trust?
It’s as good a time as any to remind you of the way online anonymity degrades our discourse. There’s a very real sense in which it erodes the last remaining undeniably human variable that social media communication still has. Think about it this way: the humanity of a conversation degrades by how many variables you take away from the interaction.
Talking, in person, to another person? Yep, that’s real connection.
Talking on the phone to another person? We’ve subtracted the face-to-face but we’re still hearing each other and picking up on tone and other subtle sub-communicatory variables.
Texting another person? We’ve further subtracted the hearing, but at least we know it’s a real person on the other side of the text conversation – one with values, aspirations, and opinions that we normally know at least a little bit about.
Messaging an anonymous person online? You have to ask, at some point, how much give-and-take is actually happening here?
In fact, there’s a very real way in which nothing about the Tea app is/was built on trust. I’m not saying that anonymous apps shouldn’t exist (although right now I feel pretty confident saying you probably should be avoiding the Tea app). I’m not saying dating apps shouldn’t exist. That would be ignorant of what can actually be built in such arenas.
But I am saying: as people who affirm the dignity of the human person, and as people interested in healthy methods for how men and women talk to each other, let’s be honest about how the failures of flimsily built online platforms reveal what technological advances can never truly give us: a 1:1 replacement for authentic community.
As Kat Rosenfield noted at the “Free Press” after the Coldplay CEO incident:
“It’s not just that it’s impossible to replicate [a communal] dynamic on a global scale, online, where the people shaming you are a faceless, nameless, avatar-masked mob. It’s that the dynamic morphs into something twisted and poisonous when you free it from the bonds and bounds of community.”
Online forums are built on trust in the way houses are built on trust: We trust that the structure is correct and won’t collapse like the Tea app. But when the structure collapses, it’s not just a practical letdown. It’s a feeling of principal betrayal from the people who built the structure. Because the kind of trust that Tea was trying to build isn’t just structural. It’s the kind of trust built in communities where the intentions are correct — where people live life together and have each other’s best interests at heart.
I go to anonymous online forums to figure out which iPhone model is the best. I don’t go to anonymous online forums to figure out things like the good life, the perfect marriage, or whether my friends are good people.
And if we as conservatives (and especially as Christians) can’t parse out the difference between those, we’re failing to advance an accurate vision of how online life and real life interact. Which is a shame — this is the question of the next decade, and we have real answers to bring to bear.
And they’re probably better than the paradox of an anonymous app that’s built on “trust.”