The Tea app lets women review their dates. Men are worried.

Should people be able to rate romantic partners by giving a public thumbs-down if they have a negative or dangerous experience?

That’s the question at the center of a debate over Tea Dating Advice, an app that shot to the top of the Apple App Store this week after posts about it trended on social media. Tea bills itself as a “dating safety” app on which women — and only women — can check a potential date’s history and anonymously provide feedback after the fact. Its inclusion of men’s photos and names has sparked concerns about privacy, even as some women say the app is helping them avoid dishonest or abusive partners.

Sabrina Henriquez, 28, said she discovered the app this week after seeing women discussing it in popular TikTok posts.

“They were going to go on a date with a certain individual, but once they got on the app and saw how much of a safety hazard this man is because of the allegations of abuse, it kind of saved them from putting themselves in that situation,” she said.

Tea has been around since 2023, when San Francisco-based founder Sean Cook came up with the idea in response to his mother’s struggles with online dating, according to a March news release. The app has tools that let users check whether a potential date is married or has a criminal record, as well as a reverse image search that helps spot catfishing. These features, however, have received far less attention than the app’s rating function, which allows women to share their experiences in Yelp-style reviews, giving men a “green flag” or “red flag.”

Henriquez said she immediately came across some men she’s dated in the Washington, D.C., area, and that any bad reviews felt deserved. In the era of dating apps, women are tired of showing up for dates with no way to vet the men they’re meeting, she said. Tea claims to fix that problem.

“It’s kind of like a Carfax situation,” she said.

The company declined to comment about Tea’s popularity or number of users.

Women are more likely than men to say that dating apps feel unsafe, according to 2023 data from Pew Research. Some took to TikTok this week to share what Tea helped them discover — including instances when a date was on a sex-offender list or had a history of domestic violence.

But Tea doesn’t limit its feedback to safety concerns. Donovan James, 21, said he came across the app this week on TikTok after seeing some men complain about bad reviews that focused on their looks or criticized them for ending a relationship. Tea says it reviews users’ selfies when they sign up to “verify” their gender, but James said he has seen men get past the verification system by using a selfie from a female friend or family member. He said he felt tempted to look because he wanted to know what women were saying about him.

“I think the app has good intentions, it’s just very messy,” he said. “You’re always going to look bad in somebody’s eyes.” Henriquez and other women on TikTok also acknowledged the potential for the app to descend into gossip.

Tea declined to comment on questions about its moderation strategy and “gender verification” process, including how it accommodates gender-nonconforming people. Its terms of service say it has a zero-tolerance policy for defamation, and some men online say they’ve successfully asked for posts to be taken down.

This isn’t the first time an effort to digitally track bad actors has faced blowback. “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” pages on Facebook have drawn millions of members who share men’s photos alongside their experiences with them with the purported goal of outing cheaters and abusers. Some men say the groups have spread false accusations, upending their lives and careers. Last year, an Illinois man sued the network’s founder, Facebook parent Meta and a woman who posted about him, for defamation. His case was ultimately dismissed. Earlier man-rating efforts from the app Lulu and the site Don’tDateHimGirl were scrapped amid criticism.

A Reddit community with more than 8,000 members is dedicated to discussing perceived problems with “AWDTSG” groups. In hundreds of posts, men say they have been insulted or body-shamed, as well as falsely accused of manipulative or abusive behavior. One person said on Reddit that he saw a post from Tea claiming he is married, when he is actually divorced. Another said he got a scathing review after ending an unpleasant date early. Many cite a lack of recourse for taking down false posts. Others reference a “mass attack by feminism” or an alleged lack of accountability for women.

Douglas Zytko, a professor at the University of Michigan at Flint who studies app design and user safety, said he understands both the praise and the criticism for Tea. Dating apps have failed to prioritize safety — especially for women and other vulnerable people — since day one, he said. To compensate, many users turn to Google searches, social media lurking and group chats to fill in the blanks before meeting someone new.

The difference with Tea, Zytko said, is that it’s centralized, allowing users to pool their feedback in one place that is accessible to hundreds of thousands. It lends itself to a pile-on effect, he said, in which users weigh in even if they haven’t had a personal experience with the man in question. It’s reasonable for men to feel anxious, he said, especially in an era when interpersonal conflict can quickly blow up into viral fodder.

Even valid criticisms might not outweigh the benefit of tools that let people crowdsource safety information, Zytko said. And calls to ban the Tea app based on some men’s experience don’t hold water within the broader discussion of dating and safety, he said.

“There are multiple studies now showing that around 10 percent of overall cases of sexual assault are attributed to a dating app now,” he said. “And we don’t see similar calls for dating apps to be wholly banned on that basis.”