4 ms·

I think its a mostly US based app, in the US sharing your opinion about other people is protected speech.

const_cast 1y ago
Sharing your opinion is protected speech, by lying is not always protected speech, particularly if done with the intent to financially hurt someone.
- gitremote 1y ago
  Do you think a women's dating safety app is mainly about women lying and intending to hurt men, because it's rare for men to stalk or sexually assault women?
  - emseetech 1y ago
    I do. Not as an indictment of women but an indictment of social apps. Apps like this are way too hard to moderate, manage and verify. They quickly get swarmed by bad actors and misused. Again, not because women don't have genuine safety concerns in the dating world but because apps are not a viable way to manage those concerns. Some social problems just don't have technological solutions.
    - gitremote 1y ago
      Like online reviews, if 10 women reported that the same man was violent, would you see it as 10 data points or 0 data points that say nothing?
      - emseetech 1y ago
        You know the answer to that is zero. There is no viable system a company, let alone a small unfunded startup, could use to verify the identity of the reporters let alone guarantee the trustworthiness of the account. Those ten reports could be made by one person. That one person might not even know the person they're accusing. That one person might be a man. That one person might be a bot. You'd have to ignore the last three decades of online identity, trolling and social media pitfalls to not recognize that. And please don't compare reviewing a can opener on Amazon to accusing someone anonymously of a heinous crime on an app built by one person. But I'm not sure I'm going to convince you with words so I'll suggest this: Go and build this app. Build it, see what happens. Nobody else has been able to crack this but maybe you can.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - philodeon 1y ago
        You’ve never read the story of the Halifax Slasher, have you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Slasher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Slasher
  - bawolff 1y ago
    That's not really relavent to whether someone is going to get sued for defamation. It might be relavent to who wins the lawsuit, but sometimes the mere existence of a lawsuit is pretty painful.
    - gitremote 1y ago
      Sure, and what was proposed was suing the women for warning others about an allegedly dangerous man, not suing the man.
      - Levitz 1y ago
        >for warning others about an allegedly dangerous man I mean if witches didn't do anything surely they wouldn't be hunted down.
  - GoatInGrey 1y ago
    We grant a tremendous amount of leeway and power to accusations made by women against men in society today. There are always honest people using things for their intended purpose. Though they are also dishonest people using things for their own ulterior motives. A well-designed system will maximize utility for the former, and minimize utility for the latter. An app where women can leave what are practically anonymous reviews for men is not such a system.
  - xhkkffbf 1y ago
    I'm sorry and I'll be voted down for this, but I do think that it will attract plenty of fibbing and deliberate or not-so-deliberate stretching of the truth. Anyone who is rejected tends to be a bit angry about it. In this case, women who are ghosted can say whatever they want. This isn't all of the people, but in my experience in life it's more than enough to make this app impossible to filter.
  - qcnguy 1y ago
    A few days ago a video leaked of a woman riding in a Mexican taxi, who was demanding the driver went faster. He refused because it'd be dangerous, and she immediately started threatening to report him as a harasser to the police. She even said he had to speed up or else the police would be waiting for him when they got there. She didn't realize her whole conversation was recorded on camera. A lot of men have had experiences like this one. Either directly or they know someone it happened to. Yeah #NotAllWomen but way too many will exploit the feminist #BelieveAllWomen culture to gain even trivial benefits. An app devoted to letting women anonymous gossip and engage in reputation warfare without fear of consequence, or even fear that the man might reply in self defense, is going to get flooded with women like the taxi passenger.
    - 9dev 1y ago
      "A lot of men" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Go read some statistics on the number of women harassed, abused, raped, and killed every day—every single day—because they are women. Go ask your mother, your sister, your wife, your female best friend, when they had their last abusive encounter. Go ask your friends of both genders what the worst things are that could happen to them when walking home at night, and compare the responses. Go read some historic accounts of how women were treated for… pretty much all of history. Go look up news articles of what can happen to women when riding a taxi. Spoiler: it’s not just a threat. Yes, there are some abusive women out there. Yes, it’s fucked up when that happens to you. But trying to insinuate the levels of violence against men would be even remotely comparable is just plain awful.
      - lazide 1y ago
        By the time a man has hit his 40’s, it is exceptionally uncommon he hasn’t seen someone hit with a false rape claim - or had one himself - by a vindictive ex. Or has been threatened with (or directly attacked) with physical violence. By people going on the same sort of rants like you just did. Some People are terrible, especially when they think they can act without consequences. Does that excuse men doing bad things too? No. But it sure does (or should!) make anyone with a brain question hyperbolic claims of abuse or violence without actual evidence.
  - Fogest 1y ago
    > Do you think a women's dating safety app is mainly about women lying That's not what it is intended for, but many people after relationships end can be extremely emotional and sometimes very spiteful. It's not uncommon for people to embellish or lie about the truth to make themselves look better and the other person look shitty. Especially if you're the one being dumped, you may be even more likely to engage in petty behaviour. I personally have experienced an ex making up a sexual assault story. This kind of app didn't exist then, but she even went as far as reporting me to the police. Luckily the police investigated and could easily discern it was a lie. Going to the police is obviously a much higher burden than using an app, and yet many females still go make false SA claims there. Do you really think it wouldn't be a common problem for people to do the same in an app at a much higher rate? People often believe things like SA claims without any evidence and will often even attack people trying to defend the person or insist on some kind of proof. It means that someone making up bull crap on these apps is going to be treated like it is true, yet the rates of lies would likely be pretty high. People can just be so crazy when it comes to relationships/love. Especially when it comes to people in their teens or early 20's, the brain isn't fully developed and dealing with these emotions is even more challenging and leads to even more rash decision making.
  - Mawr 1y ago
    > because it's rare for men to stalk or sexually assault women? The more common it is, the more damaging false claims of it are. It's a self-defeating linear relationship.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    [dead]
- firefax 1y ago
  Devil's advocate, but how is saying someone is an unreliable romantic partner going to financially hurt someone? Maybe the reason I haven't had success in the policy arena is because I've been too kind, given recent events :-)
  - lazide 1y ago
    What words do you think a vindictive ex uses? I don’t think ‘unreliable romantic partner’ are any of them. I have seen false rape claims, false claims of child abuse, neglect, etc. With zero repercussions, of course.
  - parineum 1y ago
    If you're boss is on the app.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    I'm not sure, it depends case to case and what the court thinks. I think, generally, if you can prove it directly caused you to lose lots of money then you can make an argument.
hyperliner 1y ago
Not if it’s libel or slander, both which are generically defamation.
- gitremote 1y ago
  It's not defamation if it's true. Why do you think women warning other women about rapey and stalker men are mostly lies? Even if it's only 5% of men, wouldn't the discussion focus on that dangerous 5% over persecuting the innocent 95%, as a matter of self-preservation?
  - GoatInGrey 1y ago
    An irony in this conversation is how normalized it is for women to be concerned about men as a demographic when it's only a small minority that inflict harm. While it's controversial for men to be concerned about women as a demographic when it's only a small minority that inflict harm. I still maintain my pet theory that this is a downstream effect of the normalization of paranoia around pedophiles that began hitting the mainstream in the '80s. The modern world is exceptionally safe, yet to the average person, it feels exceptionally dangerous. ...While I've got the hood up, I'll continue soapboxing. I've started seeing rare instances such as a young woman walking around a corner and there is a man rounding the same corner, surprising her by mistake, and the woman starts crying or breathing in a panicked way, unable to regulate herself for several minutes. It's not always walking around the corner at the same time, but there's a common pattern of being surprised by a man just going about his day and experiencing a severe fear response to that interaction. When I look at a lot of cultural related issues today, beyond just gender, I see many signs of pervasive psychological issues. I don't know what the solution is, but I'm very confident that the root cause is more complicated than something you can describe in a single sentence.
    - gitremote 1y ago
      > An irony in this conversation is how normalized it is for women to be concerned about men as a demographic when it's only a small minority that inflict harm. The same hypothetical 5% can inflict harm to multiple women, that's why multiple women and girls complained about Epstein and Trump.
perihelions 1y ago
But sharing *facts* about other people is potentially defamatory speech (in the American context). There's a not-at-all small nuance here: when you make concrete allegations about your personal experiences, you're not sharing an opinion—not sharing your subjective reaction to publicly-known information—rather you're introducing novel facts, provable objective facts, into the discussion—your version of those facts. And that comes with genuine legal risks. A remarkable fact that's stayed with me: Ken White (@popehat) once said that in his defamation law practice, his largest category of consultations was with clients who'd said negative things about a past romantic partner, who then threatened to sue. I believe his point was those negative things were true most of the time, but difficult to prove, or defend.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > But sharing facts about other people is potentially defamatory speech Yes, and? The service is protected in the US by Section 230, and Tea doesn't operate anywhere else currently. Individual users who use it defame are, in principal, subject to defamation liability, but in the US (and, again, that’s the only jurisdiction currently relevant), the burden to proving that the description was both false and at least negligently made (as well as the other elements of the tort) falls on the plaintiff (it is often said that “truth is an absolute defense”, but that’s misleading—falsity and fault are both elements of the prima facie case the plaintiff must establish.) Sure, in a jurisdiction with strict liability for libel and where truth is actually a defense, and/or where the platform itself, being a deep pockets target, was exposed, Tea would be a more precarious business. But that’s not where it operates.
  - perihelions 1y ago
    That's all true. I wasn't clear on the context of this thread, whether we were talking about the users or the platform.
  - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
    The most obvious legal claim at the moment is that Tea was negligent about its security. I suspect that's going to be more of a problem for Tea than hypothetical individual defamation cases. Although having said that, how can you sue someone for defamation if you never find out you're being defamed? Any woman can say "Don't date [name], he's a bad person" and the victim will never know. Unless he asks a female friend for a social credit check, all [name] will see is a shrinking pool of opportunities.
mjbroe02 1y ago
That doesn't apply when you publish information for broad consumption. Then it becomes libel. People need to realize that posting on a site where you can reasonably expect that your words may be consumed by the masses makes you a publisher. That comes with responsibilities and is not protected the same way as an individual's personal speech.
DocTomoe 1y ago
So all I need to do to mark another guy (who might be, for example, competing for a job I want, or a certain woman's attention) as a rapist on a platform that's used by people in the location this guy lives in in the US is a (fake) female driver's license, a photo of the guy in question, and a name? coolcoolcool. I'm sure that never ever gets abused horrifically.

Sharing your opinion is protected speech, by lying is not always protected speech, particularly if done with the intent to financially hurt someone.

gitremote 1y ago
Do you think a women's dating safety app is mainly about women lying and intending to hurt men, because it's rare for men to stalk or sexually assault women?
- emseetech 1y ago
  I do. Not as an indictment of women but an indictment of social apps. Apps like this are way too hard to moderate, manage and verify. They quickly get swarmed by bad actors and misused. Again, not because women don't have genuine safety concerns in the dating world but because apps are not a viable way to manage those concerns. Some social problems just don't have technological solutions.
  - gitremote 1y ago
    Like online reviews, if 10 women reported that the same man was violent, would you see it as 10 data points or 0 data points that say nothing?
    - emseetech 1y ago
      You know the answer to that is zero. There is no viable system a company, let alone a small unfunded startup, could use to verify the identity of the reporters let alone guarantee the trustworthiness of the account. Those ten reports could be made by one person. That one person might not even know the person they're accusing. That one person might be a man. That one person might be a bot. You'd have to ignore the last three decades of online identity, trolling and social media pitfalls to not recognize that. And please don't compare reviewing a can opener on Amazon to accusing someone anonymously of a heinous crime on an app built by one person. But I'm not sure I'm going to convince you with words so I'll suggest this: Go and build this app. Build it, see what happens. Nobody else has been able to crack this but maybe you can.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - philodeon 1y ago
      You’ve never read the story of the Halifax Slasher, have you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Slasher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Slasher
- bawolff 1y ago
  That's not really relavent to whether someone is going to get sued for defamation. It might be relavent to who wins the lawsuit, but sometimes the mere existence of a lawsuit is pretty painful.
  - gitremote 1y ago
    Sure, and what was proposed was suing the women for warning others about an allegedly dangerous man, not suing the man.
    - Levitz 1y ago
      >for warning others about an allegedly dangerous man I mean if witches didn't do anything surely they wouldn't be hunted down.
- GoatInGrey 1y ago
  We grant a tremendous amount of leeway and power to accusations made by women against men in society today. There are always honest people using things for their intended purpose. Though they are also dishonest people using things for their own ulterior motives. A well-designed system will maximize utility for the former, and minimize utility for the latter. An app where women can leave what are practically anonymous reviews for men is not such a system.
- xhkkffbf 1y ago
  I'm sorry and I'll be voted down for this, but I do think that it will attract plenty of fibbing and deliberate or not-so-deliberate stretching of the truth. Anyone who is rejected tends to be a bit angry about it. In this case, women who are ghosted can say whatever they want. This isn't all of the people, but in my experience in life it's more than enough to make this app impossible to filter.
- qcnguy 1y ago
  A few days ago a video leaked of a woman riding in a Mexican taxi, who was demanding the driver went faster. He refused because it'd be dangerous, and she immediately started threatening to report him as a harasser to the police. She even said he had to speed up or else the police would be waiting for him when they got there. She didn't realize her whole conversation was recorded on camera. A lot of men have had experiences like this one. Either directly or they know someone it happened to. Yeah #NotAllWomen but way too many will exploit the feminist #BelieveAllWomen culture to gain even trivial benefits. An app devoted to letting women anonymous gossip and engage in reputation warfare without fear of consequence, or even fear that the man might reply in self defense, is going to get flooded with women like the taxi passenger.
  - 9dev 1y ago
    "A lot of men" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Go read some statistics on the number of women harassed, abused, raped, and killed every day—every single day—because they are women. Go ask your mother, your sister, your wife, your female best friend, when they had their last abusive encounter. Go ask your friends of both genders what the worst things are that could happen to them when walking home at night, and compare the responses. Go read some historic accounts of how women were treated for… pretty much all of history. Go look up news articles of what can happen to women when riding a taxi. Spoiler: it’s not just a threat. Yes, there are some abusive women out there. Yes, it’s fucked up when that happens to you. But trying to insinuate the levels of violence against men would be even remotely comparable is just plain awful.
    - lazide 1y ago
      By the time a man has hit his 40’s, it is exceptionally uncommon he hasn’t seen someone hit with a false rape claim - or had one himself - by a vindictive ex. Or has been threatened with (or directly attacked) with physical violence. By people going on the same sort of rants like you just did. Some People are terrible, especially when they think they can act without consequences. Does that excuse men doing bad things too? No. But it sure does (or should!) make anyone with a brain question hyperbolic claims of abuse or violence without actual evidence.
- Fogest 1y ago
  > Do you think a women's dating safety app is mainly about women lying That's not what it is intended for, but many people after relationships end can be extremely emotional and sometimes very spiteful. It's not uncommon for people to embellish or lie about the truth to make themselves look better and the other person look shitty. Especially if you're the one being dumped, you may be even more likely to engage in petty behaviour. I personally have experienced an ex making up a sexual assault story. This kind of app didn't exist then, but she even went as far as reporting me to the police. Luckily the police investigated and could easily discern it was a lie. Going to the police is obviously a much higher burden than using an app, and yet many females still go make false SA claims there. Do you really think it wouldn't be a common problem for people to do the same in an app at a much higher rate? People often believe things like SA claims without any evidence and will often even attack people trying to defend the person or insist on some kind of proof. It means that someone making up bull crap on these apps is going to be treated like it is true, yet the rates of lies would likely be pretty high. People can just be so crazy when it comes to relationships/love. Especially when it comes to people in their teens or early 20's, the brain isn't fully developed and dealing with these emotions is even more challenging and leads to even more rash decision making.
- Mawr 1y ago
  > because it's rare for men to stalk or sexually assault women? The more common it is, the more damaging false claims of it are. It's a self-defeating linear relationship.
- const_cast 1y ago
  [dead]
firefax 1y ago
Devil's advocate, but how is saying someone is an unreliable romantic partner going to financially hurt someone? Maybe the reason I haven't had success in the policy arena is because I've been too kind, given recent events :-)
- lazide 1y ago
  What words do you think a vindictive ex uses? I don’t think ‘unreliable romantic partner’ are any of them. I have seen false rape claims, false claims of child abuse, neglect, etc. With zero repercussions, of course.
- parineum 1y ago
  If you're boss is on the app.
- const_cast 1y ago
  I'm not sure, it depends case to case and what the court thinks. I think, generally, if you can prove it directly caused you to lose lots of money then you can make an argument.

hyperliner 1y ago

Not if it’s libel or slander, both which are generically defamation.

gitremote 1y ago
It's not defamation if it's true. Why do you think women warning other women about rapey and stalker men are mostly lies? Even if it's only 5% of men, wouldn't the discussion focus on that dangerous 5% over persecuting the innocent 95%, as a matter of self-preservation?
- GoatInGrey 1y ago
  An irony in this conversation is how normalized it is for women to be concerned about men as a demographic when it's only a small minority that inflict harm. While it's controversial for men to be concerned about women as a demographic when it's only a small minority that inflict harm. I still maintain my pet theory that this is a downstream effect of the normalization of paranoia around pedophiles that began hitting the mainstream in the '80s. The modern world is exceptionally safe, yet to the average person, it feels exceptionally dangerous. ...While I've got the hood up, I'll continue soapboxing. I've started seeing rare instances such as a young woman walking around a corner and there is a man rounding the same corner, surprising her by mistake, and the woman starts crying or breathing in a panicked way, unable to regulate herself for several minutes. It's not always walking around the corner at the same time, but there's a common pattern of being surprised by a man just going about his day and experiencing a severe fear response to that interaction. When I look at a lot of cultural related issues today, beyond just gender, I see many signs of pervasive psychological issues. I don't know what the solution is, but I'm very confident that the root cause is more complicated than something you can describe in a single sentence.
  - gitremote 1y ago
    > An irony in this conversation is how normalized it is for women to be concerned about men as a demographic when it's only a small minority that inflict harm. The same hypothetical 5% can inflict harm to multiple women, that's why multiple women and girls complained about Epstein and Trump.

perihelions 1y ago

But sharing *facts* about other people is potentially defamatory speech (in the American context). There's a not-at-all small nuance here: when you make concrete allegations about your personal experiences, you're not sharing an opinion—not sharing your subjective reaction to publicly-known information—rather you're introducing novel facts, provable objective facts, into the discussion—your version of those facts. And that comes with genuine legal risks. A remarkable fact that's stayed with me: Ken White (@popehat) once said that in his defamation law practice, his largest category of consultations was with clients who'd said negative things about a past romantic partner, who then threatened to sue. I believe his point was those negative things were true most of the time, but difficult to prove, or defend.

dragonwriter 1y ago
> But sharing facts about other people is potentially defamatory speech Yes, and? The service is protected in the US by Section 230, and Tea doesn't operate anywhere else currently. Individual users who use it defame are, in principal, subject to defamation liability, but in the US (and, again, that’s the only jurisdiction currently relevant), the burden to proving that the description was both false and at least negligently made (as well as the other elements of the tort) falls on the plaintiff (it is often said that “truth is an absolute defense”, but that’s misleading—falsity and fault are both elements of the prima facie case the plaintiff must establish.) Sure, in a jurisdiction with strict liability for libel and where truth is actually a defense, and/or where the platform itself, being a deep pockets target, was exposed, Tea would be a more precarious business. But that’s not where it operates.
- perihelions 1y ago
  That's all true. I wasn't clear on the context of this thread, whether we were talking about the users or the platform.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  The most obvious legal claim at the moment is that Tea was negligent about its security. I suspect that's going to be more of a problem for Tea than hypothetical individual defamation cases. Although having said that, how can you sue someone for defamation if you never find out you're being defamed? Any woman can say "Don't date [name], he's a bad person" and the victim will never know. Unless he asks a female friend for a social credit check, all [name] will see is a shrinking pool of opportunities.

mjbroe02 1y ago

That doesn't apply when you publish information for broad consumption. Then it becomes libel. People need to realize that posting on a site where you can reasonably expect that your words may be consumed by the masses makes you a publisher. That comes with responsibilities and is not protected the same way as an individual's personal speech.

DocTomoe 1y ago

So all I need to do to mark another guy (who might be, for example, competing for a job I want, or a certain woman's attention) as a rapist on a platform that's used by people in the location this guy lives in in the US is a (fake) female driver's license, a photo of the guy in question, and a name? coolcoolcool. I'm sure that never ever gets abused horrifically.