Spilling the Tea: How a popular app has become a source of disinformation

In Armstrong Student Center, dining halls and dorms, students are buzzing about Tea Dating Service, an app that allows women to post photos and identifying information about men and rate them.

The app has already had serious repercussions for many, including students at Miami University. Ben Herrholtz, a sophomore finance major, said he thinks the app is an infringement on people’s privacy and unfair to some of the men posted on it.

“I know that my roommate has been posted on it, actually, and it caused him and his girlfriend to break up,” Herrholtz said. “His ex-girlfriend wrote some things that I guess weren't true about him, and his girlfriend saw that.”

The app was originally designed to help women anonymously alert each other to predatory men. Other tools offered by Tea include criminal records and reverse image searches. Despite the original intention of the app, many women have used it to air their grievances, making posts that may not be based in truth.

Natalia Salazar, a first-year business major, said she heard about the app through a friend and downloaded it because she was interested in what was being said, especially after hearing some of her male friends had been posted on it.

“It's all fun and games, but I think that it could lead to very false interpretations of people,” Salazar said. “The things that they say about some of our friends, if you met them, it's not exactly true.”

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Kate Beard, a first-year sport communication and media major, agreed that while the app could be entertaining, it was difficult to discern the truth. Initially, she thought the app was funny, but after seeing some of her friends react to posts made about them, she started to view the app in a different light.

“It's not 100% accurate,” Beard said, “so I would never base my opinion on somebody just from those comments.”

For male students, the stakes are high, but there is little to no control over what gets posted since the app requires users to verify that they are female before creating an account. Adam Arling, a first-year kinesiology major, said he knew of at least five of his friends who had been posted on the app. For many of them, the information posted about them was a mix of truth and lies.

“They're getting posted on this app without their consent, and it's also anonymous comments, so they're getting potentially false information spread about them,” Arling said.

Herrholtz also said he felt like the design of the app is meant to make it difficult for men who have been posted to address things that may be true, because the posts are attributed to them forever.

“I understand customer reviews for something like a product on Amazon, but a customer review for somebody who's dating someone … I feel like you're just not giving them the opportunity to change as a person,” Herrholtz said. “Somebody's old habits could have affected someone, but then you try and meet someone new, and then they look this up [on the app] and they see this person's kind of a bad person. It doesn't give them a chance to redeem themselves.”

Ellie Grossman, the assistant director for sexual and interpersonal violence prevention for Student Health Services, said she heard about it from resident assistants on campus, who said the app was popular among their residents. Grossman said she worries that the first reaction of a student who feels hurt or upset might be to post something incendiary online.

“I would say that the basis of the app, that's a good thing,” Grossman said. “We want our students to know how to take care of each other. We want our students to be able to share resources. This is just maybe manifested into something that is not the ideal way we would want them to do that.”

Ava Vasquez, a first-year education major, said some women leave comments defending their friends on someone else’s post, but this fact-checking only occurred on a small portion of posts on the app.

“There are some girls [who] will comment and be like, ‘That's my friend. He's never done that,’” Vasquez said.

Alex Fields, director of the Office of Community Standards, said that while Miami has policies that protect the safety and well-being of students, there are no policies for specific apps, like Tea. She also said that Miami does not have anyone specifically monitoring the app, but urged students to report if they see or experience harm because of the app.

“It's not a space for us, so if something comes up that should be shared or should be addressed, students have to tell us,” Fields said. “That's not to say that we're completely unaware, but we aren't in all the same spaces that our students are.”

mahones5@miamioh.edu