Matt Walsh recently criticized the viral Tea App and its founder, claiming that the app serves as a forum for "defamation against innocent people."
Founded by Sean Cook, a software engineer, the Tea App is a women-only platform that provides individuals with the "tools they need to date safely in a world that often overlooks their protection."
The app allows women to post photos and basic information about men they are currently dating, have dated, or are considering dating. The information includes their first name, age, and location, to seek dating advice from other verified women.
In this July 29 episode of the Matt Walsh Show, host Matt Walsh criticized the app, describing it as a platform where women "gossip and spread rumours" about men that they go on dates with, without the men's consent or knowledge.
Reviewing a recent interview with Sean Cook, Walsh claimed that the founder of the dating safety platform for women has no "sympathy" for the men who are defamed and whose privacy has been violated on the app.
On the May 13 episode of The Release Podcast, Cook said the Tea App gets around three legal threats a day from men upset that women are sharing mostly true stories about them. He mentioned a men's rights group trying to shut the app down with mass petitions and reports. Despite the backlash, Cook said they see the app as a valuable service and aren’t bothered by the criticism.
"We believe that women deserve to be able to share their stories and to be able to have safe relationships," Sean Cook said.However, Walsh expressed skepticism about Cook's claims that the stories women share about men on the app are "largely true." He questioned how anyone could verify that the "negative" stories about a man are indeed "largely true," noting the lack of evidence to back up those claims.
"He [Sean Cook] has the moral sense of a lizard, you know, or of a rat scurrying around in the gutter," Walsh exclaimed."There was basically no security on this app" — Matt Walsh reacts to Tea App data breach
Furthermore, in his commentary video, Matt Walsh reacted to the Tea App breach, explaining that hackers gained access to about 72,000 images. This included 13,000 images of selfies and photo IDs submitted by women during account verification, as well as 59,000 images that were publicly posted on the app.
According to NBC News, on the morning of Friday, July 25, a 4Chan user posted a link that allegedly allowed users to download a database of stolen images.
Reacting to the news, Matt Walsh remarked:
"And now I don't know anything about this kind of stuff. I fully admit that. So, I can't speak to this myself, but from what I've read, this wasn't even really a hack because there was basically no security on this app at all."Meanwhile, on July 28, 404 Media reported on the second security breach of the Tea App, which impacted a separate database, allowing access to over 1.1 million users' direct messages dating back to 2023 and extending up to last week.
In a statement published on the Tea App's official website, the executives stated:
"As part of our ongoing investigation into the cybersecurity incident involving the Tea App, we have recently learned that some direct messages (DMs) were accessed as part of the initial incident. Out of an abundance of caution, we have taken the affected system offline."The Tea App, which recently became a top free app in the Apple Store, was inspired by Sean Cook's mother's "terrifying experience with online dating," during which she was catfished and unknowingly dated men "who had criminal records."
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Edited by Divya Singh