Congress Investigates TeaOnHer App for Letting Men Post About Women Without Their Consent
It sounds like something niche feminist bloggers might have taken up 10 years ago. But this is being led by Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives.
Is chatting about a woman without her express permission illegal? Some members of the House of Representatives seem to think so. They've sent investigative demands to an app called TeaOnHer over it allowing users to post images, information, and sometimes mean or sexually explicit comments about women "without their consent."
It sounds like the kind of thing that might have riled up some niche feminist bloggers 10 years ago. But because we live in the weirdest timeline, the investigation comes from two Republican lawmakers, Reps. James Comer of Kentucky and Nancy Mace of South Carolina.
In an October 24 letter to Xaiver Lampkin, the app's creator, Comer and Mace announce that the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating TeaOnHer for a host of alleged wrongs.
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Launched in August, TeaOnHer bills itself as "dating safety companion." Last week, the company announced the app had passed 2 million users.
According to Comer and Mace, TeaOnHer "allows and encourages anonymous users to post images and personally-identifying information about women, including minors, without their consent." It also "permits users to make harassing, abusive, defamatory, and sexually explicit comments about these women and minors," they say, and it "fails to provide a mechanism for such victims to access your platform to remove their images posted without their consent."
"It appears that your application may be in violation of federal and state law," write the lawmakers in their letter.
But many of the the things they mention are not illegal. And even those that would be crimes are committed by individual users, not by the TeaOnHer app.
This looks like another example of censorial overreach.
Posting About People Without Their Consent Isn't a Crime
While the recently enacted TAKE IT DOWN Act made it a federal crime to post "nonconsensual intimate imagery," there's nothing generally illegal about posting an ordinary picture of someone—including a minor—without the person's consent. There's nothing generally illegal about providing a platform that allows people to post such images, nor about doing so without providing a mechanism to allow individuals to request their takedown. And there's nothing generally illegal about making mean or sexually explicit comments about people online, nor about providing a platform that enables people doing so.
Of course, some of these things could cross a line into criminal harassment territory, just as they could potentially be cause for private suits alleging defamation, invasion of privacy, or other civil claims. Posting sexually explicit images, especially of minors, may also be cause for criminal or civil actions.
But in any such cases, it's on prosecutors or private plaintiffs to point to particular posts and make particular claims. And for the most part, these claims would need to be made against the people posting the offending content, not against the platform that merely served as a conduit for said posts.
It is absolutely not the role of federal lawmakers to step in with a fishing expedition for potential criminal or civilly actionable content. And we shouldn't let the nature of the claims here distract us from what's really going on.
Do I want to defend the honor of random men posting pictures, personal stories, and rude comments about women they know? Not really. But I will defend their First Amendment right to do so. And I will note that this is scarcely different from many #MeToo-era apps and forums devoted to telling tales about allegedly caddish or dangerous men.
You cannot have a world in which it's legal for women to share "tea on him" but not for men to use the TeaOnHer app. And I don't think we should cheer a world in which federal lawmakers proactively investigate platforms for either.
Another Congressional Fishing Expedition
If there's evidence of specific crimes, let the Department of Justice or state or local law enforcement investigate. If individuals have specific allegations of defamation, or copyright violations, or anything else that crosses a legal line, let them file lawsuits against the alleged offender. If the company is violating state data privacy laws, let the states in question investigate.
What we don't need is members of Congress publicly slinging accusations without any due process, or broadly fishing for evidence of bad speech.
This is not new. We've seen similar things before, most notably involving Backpage. But that doesn't make it any less disturbing.
And as with so many arenas of government overreach, this sort of thing doesn't say confined to allegations involving sexual wrongdoing and/or minors. The more we allow and encourage it based on those circumstances, the more we pave the way for broad congressional investigations over all sorts of speech that people in power find objectionable, including objections based purely on politics.
Comer and Mace note that under House Rule X, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform "has broad authority to investigate 'any matter' at 'any time.'" But just because they can do this doesn't mean they should.
Remember Section 230?
In this case, lawmakers are seeking a ton of information on TeaOnHer's policies and internal communications. One request that stands out to me is a request for "all processes and procedures TeaOnHer uses to verify that content posted on the app are truthful and not defamatory." This seems to imply that TeaOnHer should have such policies in place.
But online platforms are not required to verify that things posted by users "are truthful and not defamatory," just as bookstores aren't required to guarantee that everything in every book they stock is true and not defamatory.
Even setting aside the First Amendment for a moment, we run into Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects online platforms from some liability for content posted by users.
TeaOnHer's creators know this, and specifically invoke Section 230 in the app's Terms of Service. These also state that "users are solely responsible for all content they post, upload, share, or otherwise make available through the service. TeaOnHer acts as a neutral platform and does not create, endorse, or control user-generated content."
The Terms of Service prohibit users from posting content that "contains images, videos, or information about other individuals without their explicit consent," content that "violates any person's right or privacy or publicity," defamatory content, harassing content, sexually explicit content, and more.
All of this was also the case with the classified-ad platform Backpage. It prohibited users from posting ads for illegal items or activity, and it (rightfully) cited Section 230 in its defense. Undeterred, lawmakers kept pressing for more and more internal communications and data from the company while publicly condemning it as complicit in sex trafficking. After enough years of fishing, authorities were able to find some evidence on which to base a criminal case, albeit on much lesser charges than those they publicly professed to be investigating.
When the government is really intent on on making an example of some company or punishing them, it almost always can. It will make a lot of horrible and sensationalistic claims in order to justify its investigative demands, then search and search until it finds something to justify a much less serious charge or breach of some administrative regulation.
TeaOnHer Now Trinity Social
Yesterday, TeaOnHer announced on X that "TeaOnHer has officially shut down. All users have been successfully migrated to Trinity Social!"
"Trinity Social is where YOU control your story. Post about yourself, not others," the TeaOnHer X account says.
The timing is odd, but it seems unlikely that the company could have drummed up a whole new app in the days since Comer and Mace sent their letter. If the new app is a response to anything, it might be trouble with distribution via app stores.
Apple recently removed both TeaOnHer and Tea, a similar product for women, from its App Store "amid complaints that users were posting personal information, including that of minors, on the platforms," reports Courthouse News. And this wasn't the first time the TeaOnHer app was removed.
On top of everything else, lawmakers may be chasing something that the market could do much more effectively.
It's Hip To Be Panicked
Everyone should read this short piece by David Sessions, who believes "that neo-atomization discourses have formed a knot of moral panic about technology that is being used as a Trojan horse for social conservatism"—and not just among conservatives.
Socially conservative views about technology, sex, and smartphones have become dominant among liberals too, notes Sessions. And "in the absence of true ethnographic curiosity about the forms of life the social web has created, authoritarian policy responses are starting to sound like bipartisan common sense."
Sessions' piece gets at a lot of things I've been thinking lately and not (yet) put into writing about how the bipartisan tech panic has moved beyond just politicians and mainstream media pundits. It's now become a major force among smaller, more independent, and generally smarter liberal and lefty writers, who have started wielding it with a same smug "look, somebody's gotta say it!" bravado typically associated with folks who are about to complain about political correctness.
I was at a conference last weekend where Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward and I found ourselves continually having to push back against conservative-leaning declinist narratives. The declinists would say—self-consciously, knowingly—that, Sure, many peoples past made these same complaints and they didn't turn out to be true, but maybe this time they really were true. Maybe out times really are exceptional! After all, some time eventually has to be the worst time, right?
This same sort of "your moral panic was silly, but mine is prescient" attitude has become not just conventional wisdom but also—even though we've been steeped in precisely this sort of discourse from the highest levels of both major parties for the past decade—shared with a posture of of brave truth-telling. It's…weird.
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• Artificial intelligence technology "has been around and iterating and evolving for decades; this particular moment of AI fanaticism specifically refers to the deep-learning approach of training AI models on huge reams of data," writes Katie Drummon of Wired. "Yes, it might seem technically intimidating. But it is, truly, not that profound….The worst thing about AI might be the fact that we can't stop talking about it."
• "Disclosing that you used AI feels as stupid as declaring, 'this was typewritten rather than handwritten,'" the tech analyst Venkatesh Rao said in a provocative conversation with Sari About of The Sublime.
• "The work of this year's Nobel laureates offers a much-needed case for optimism in the wake of technological change," writes Max Gulker of Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes this website).
• Section 230 applies to scammy coin collector ads, notes Eric Goldman.
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