Users from 4chan claim to have discovered an exposed database hosted on Google’s mobile app development platform, Firebase, belonging to the newly popular women’s dating safety app Tea. Users say they are rifling through peoples’ personal data and selfies uploaded to the app, and then posting that data online, according to screenshots, 4chan posts, and code reviewed by 404 Media.
I think there’s also a lot of confirmation bias, in the sense that you need to consider why people would seek out such an app. Why would women seek out a women-only app? And inversely, why would men seek out a men-only app? The answer to each will be fundamentally different, which means the user bases will be fundamentally different as well.
Basically, what types of women would go out of their way to engage with a women-only app? Chances are good that the average woman has probably had the thought before, and is doing so to try and stay safe. The active engagement is seen as a positive thing, and she’s willing to jump through a few hoops (like uploading a photo ID) to get there.
Now imagine the inverse. Most guys probably wouldn’t even think of using a men-only app for safety reasons. Like it’s not even on their radar, because safety while dating isn’t something they’re concerned with. Most men probably wouldn’t think of seeking out a men-only app at all. So the pool of men who would be willing to go out of their way to engage with a men-only app is going to look vastly different. The average user likely won’t reflect the average man, because the average man wouldn’t even think to seek out a men-only app. Or if he does, he doesn’t feel strongly enough about it to jump through any hoops to engage. It means the average user would most likely be one of the extremely toxic manosphere/men’s rights advocate/creep/etc stereotypes instead.
To be clear, this isn’t a “not all men” post. Because the reality is that it’s certainly enough men to be concerning. My point is simply that the confirmation bias will be a large factor in whether or not the user base actually reflects the average person.
It’s basically the same way the average Lemmy user doesn’t reflect the average person. If you looked at the average Lemmy user and tried to print that into society, you’d expect the average person to be a Linux-using communist programmer.
Funnily enough there was a men-only equivalent of this. It got removed from the appstore because it became a revenge porn hub.
Disclaimer: Please consider this a sort of fork of your discussion so far, I only mean to say anything about the parts of your comment I actually reference.
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To a significant degree, yes, but I think you are overstating that degree.
Tea is imo more like a gossip app, ala Nextdoor, just specific to dating.
Tea isn’t a dating app, it is… I guess you could call it … dating-app-meta-review app, from a technically minded standpoint?
A supplement to a (or many) dating app(s).
But it doesn’t actually directly link to[(EDIT: whoops I accidentally a sentence there.)]
It is named ‘tea’, as in gossiping, the deets, the low down, the real story, etc.
Literally this is their own marketing:
https://www.teaforwomen.com/about
It is literally just a replacement for Facebook ‘Are we dating the same guy’ groups, but better, if you pay, because the Premium account allows you to run background / criminal / sex offender records.
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So, a rough equivalent for guys would probably be named something like MPH, officially Miles Per Hour, unofficially, Miles Per Hoe, I dunno, something edgy for the manosphere crowd, where guys would gossip about cheating girls/women, and also be able to run background checks on them for a premium.
I can guarantee you that men would be broadly interested in such an app if it existed.
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Maybe not as much in the safety sense of immediate physical danger, but absolutely in the sense of… is this person financially abusive, emotionally manipulative, do they have kids, or a massive amount of debt/bad spending habits, an STI, etc, that they don’t mention untill they’ve been dating you for some time, do they have a history of acting like they’re committed when they’ve in the past cheated whilst acting like they were monogamous?
These kinds of things apply to both men and women, and are far more common to occur in a dating/relationship than physical abuse.
Yes, women are more likely to be the victim of physical or sexual violence or stalking…
But its not like this doesn’t happen to men.
I can personally tell you that I, a guy, have been so lucky as to have had all three of those happen to me, done by women.
But lets not just use myself as an anecdote, here are the stats on that from the CDC, last updated before the Trump Admin got into power, doesn’t look like they’ve fucked with this page.
https://www.cdc.gov/intimate-partner-violence/about/index.html
We could quibble about the exact stats of what sex/gender the partner was, and they do cite some studies directly, but uh, oversimplifying to pretend only heterosexuality exists…
About half as many men have been seriously, violently victimized or stalked as women, and I’d be willing to bet the psychological abuse numbers are at least a bit closer to equal if you account for men being unwilling to admit to being victimized in that way due to internalized machismo, ‘shut up and deal with it’, whatever you want to call it.
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Point of me saying all this is to throw numbers toward countering your claim here:
I agree that it wouldn’t represent the average man, but we’ve got a potential user pool of 50+ million men in the US who’ve been through a bad relationship and would probably also not want to go through that again.
Again, yes it is absolutely true that women more often experience a more severe form of relationship than men, no argument there.
But I don’t think you can just say that a man version of tea would only appeal to blackpilled manosphere men.
Yes, that would likely be a large proportion of the user base, but there are tons of men who are not misogynists and also would like to avoid being played or abused.
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Also, uh:
You say that,
But what I am seeing is:
https://www.fastcompany.com/91374409/everything-to-know-about-tea-the-viral-and-controversial-app-that-lets-women-mark-men-as-red-flags
The rest of that quote is that the picture is ‘verified by the Tea team’, but I think we both know that almost certainly means they just use an AI face scanning tool.
Anyway, point is: taking a selfie is a way, way lower bar to entry than taking a picture of your driver’s liscense… basically every dating app already does the former, this is totally normal now, whereas the latter is… so uncommon I cannot think of an example.
So…taking a selfie is not that much of a trifle, not a strong potential blocker, for a guy who’s already used a dating app in the last 5 ish years.
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EDIT 2:
Occured to me on reviewing this:
… Yeah, an AI face recognition to verify gender?
How… does that work for trans folks, or even probably just non white women, and are women who are maybe bald or have more typically masculine coded shorter hair cuts, with less stereotypically/heuristically feminine facial features?
AI has fucked up this kinda shit in the past quite badly.
This is a valid take but also consider that the “average man” in the USA is more likely to be a Trump voter or non-voter than someone who would vote to protect women’s rights. Over half of men voters vote for Republican Presidental candidates consistently. On the flip side men supporting Democrat Presidential candidates mostly clocks in at just above 40%. When you account for the size of the USA, those differences are pretty big and put arguably awful men in the clear majority.
I’d love to see where you got your stats, because it looks like you may have cherry-picked a specific group of men for that 60/40 split. The overall split for men in 2024 was closer to 52/46 Republican/Democrat. 52% is still obviously above 50%, but a 6% split between the two is nowhere near the ~20% split you listed. Some specific demographics of men come close to that 60/40 split, but that says more about those specific demographics. For instance, married men swing harder right, but married women do too.
https://cawp.rutgers.edu/blog/gender-differences-2024-presidential-vote
This is for all men and women, not broken down by different factors.
When an average is taken of all the elections, men average 43.67% for Democrat and 50% for Republican for a 6.33% difference. I do also think it’s notable that in only one election since 2000 has the support for Republican candidates from men been under 50%, that’s 48% for McCain in 2008. I honestly think the voting patterns from the 90’s are gone and so while I included those in the averages, I think just touching on votes since 2000 gives a clearer picture with the average for men supporting the Democratic candidate at 44.14% and support for the Republican candidate at 52.58% for an 8.44% difference. That’s still a large spread when we’re talking the total number of men who vote at all. Somewhere around the size of the entire city of Los Angeles in terms of population.
I mean…
Looking at mic_check’s figures…
Lets say we are just talking straight, hetero people.
We got all straight men at 43:55 Dem to Rep, thats a 22% higher chance of a woman randomly picking a Rep instead of a Dem.
Meanwhile you can just, as a woman who is looking into dating a man…
Just pick a random, single, never married dude.
Bam!, now its 61:37 Dem to Rep, a 65% higher chance a random, never married dude will be a Dem than a Rep.
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We are talking about these stats in the context of dating, right?
Where people like, talk, get to know each other?
Not just being randomly assigned partners from a slot machine?
Do dating apps not like, allow you to filter by something like this, or… talk/chat to a person, and ask them questions before you meet them…?
Its kind of silly to paint individual people with a broadly accurate brush… when the ostensible whole point is to get to know a person individually.
Sure, use broad stats to form a broadly accurate general worldview, but realize its limitations.