Launched in 2023, the Tea app marketed itself as a women-only, anonymous dating-review app on which users could safely verify identities and trade warnings about the men they'd dated.

While supporters saw it as a way for women to look out for one another, critics saw an app that weaponized gossip and skirted the edges of doxxing and defamation.

That ethical tug-of-war was still raging in July 2025 when a 4chan user purportedly unearthed a massive security flaw in the Tea app’s backend, exposing over 70,000 users' photos and IDs.

What followed was a chaos that culminated in the creation of "TeaSpill," an anonymous site that crowdsourced rankings of the leaked women's photos. Here's a recap of the events and why it's appearing in so many memes lately.

What's The Tea App, and How Did the Data Leak Occur?

The Tea app was built on a model of exclusivity. In order to gain access, they were required to upload a selfie or a government-issued ID to verify their gender. Once inside, users could submit photos or phone numbers of men they'd dated, browse community-generated warnings and receive alerts about nearby flagged individuals.

The system was designed to be closed-loop and did not allow screenshots to share information outside the app. As of late July 2025, it had over 1.6 million users, mostly Gen Z women.

But on July 25th, a user on 4chan's /pol/ board seemingly exposed a gaping security flaw in the app. They shared a set of censored U.S. driver's licenses and claimed they'd been scraped from a public Firebase storage bucket belonging to the Tea app, one with no authentication protocols in place.

"If you sent Tea App your face and drivers license, they doxxed you publicly! No authentication, no nothing," the user wrote, linking to a Python script for others to scrape the same files.

The leak gained immediate traction and attention online as it was picked up and spread. Redditor /u/RoachedCoach reposted a 404 Media article to the /r/technology subreddit that same day, and X user @CryptoCyberia amplified it with a viral tweet, asking, "Was this vibe coded?"

What Information Did Users Recover From the Tea App Leak?

Nefarious actors soon realized that each photo also included geolocation metadata. Some 4chan users were quick to weaponize this information, with one user on the site's /g/ board compiling the data into a searchable Google Map, writing, "I made a map of the roasties, enjoy" ("roasties" is a derogatory slang for a promiscuous woman).

The map reportedly showed thousands of pins across the U.S., linked to women who had uploaded selfies for verification.

Things spiraled further from there. X user @BelowTearline claimed to have found a selfie taken "on the flight line at a secret military base," suggesting a Tea user had uploaded her ID from inside a restricted facility.

The same user later posted another unverified claim, "If you are the spouse of a high-ranking Congressman, don't take a selfie to sign up for a gossip app from inside the home of the individual you are having an affair with."

In response, the official Tea app Instagram account, @theteapartygirls, issued a statement. It claimed the leaked photos were from before 2023 and had been archived "to meet law enforcement standards around cyberbullying prevention." The post further asserted that users who signed up after February 2024 were unaffected by the breach.

What Is the TeaSpill Leaderboard?

By July 26th, 2025, the fallout had evolved from outrage to something more controversial, further fueling the leak's virality online. A new website surfaced: TeaSpill, a crowdsourced ranking platform that lets users vote on leaked selfies from the Tea app.

Borrowing both its design logic and cynicism from Zuckerberg's original Facemash project, the site prompted users to "Click on the Foid you prefer." Each choice fed into a public leaderboard that ranked the women based on popularity.

The site quickly spread as it garnered more attention amid the controversy in late July 2025.

For instance, X user @ryanasanchez tweeted, "Someone created a website where you can rate the users of the hacked feminist doxing app 'Tea.' Is this the most chopped userbase of all time?" That post gained traction on July 26th and was soon mirrored in a 4chan /pol/ thread titled “RATE YOUR FOID,” which was reposted to Reddit’s /r/4chan subreddit, earning over 2,000 upvotes in two days.

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For the full history of the Tea App Data Leak, be sure to check out Know Your Meme's encyclopedia entry for more information.