Online Reputation Managers Have Come for Tea

In 2011, The New York Times published an article that explored a growing business: helping people repair their online reputations. As journalist Nick Bilton phrased it, these companies generally work “by spotlighting flattering features and concealing negative ones.” Fifteen years later, there is still demand for those services — but the permutations that the current state of the internet requires has resulted in the industry evolving in unexpected ways.

One of those permutations involves the app Tea, which describes its offering as “dating safety tools that protect women.” (For a more in-depth rundown of how the app works, this article from last summer offers a good overview — as well as details on a data breach Tea faced in 2025.) Tea allows its users to anonymously comment on men they have dated, with goals like avoiding potential catfishing situations and encountering sex offenders.

And now, details have come to light about one service that seeks to improve the reputations of men who have received poor ratings on Tea. As Emanuel Maiberg reports for 404 Media, a service called Tea App Green Flags — whose website touts “[p]rofessional defamation removal and reputation management for Tea App, Facebook, and beyond” — has entered the proverbial arena, offering its services to men who feel that they have been wrongly maligned on the app.

The founder of Tea App Green Flags, a man named Jay, told 404 Media that the service is focused on responding to relatively minor criticisms. “We’ve noticed that a lot of the individuals that come to us, almost all of them, come to us for little stupid things,” he said. (The founder cited accusations of smelling bad and concerns over penis size as

Could the Dating Safety App Tea Still Work?

Tea allows women, and only women, to anonymously post reviews of men they’ve gone on dates with

According to what the service’s founder told 404 Media, Tea App Green Flags will not work with certain people, with men accused of sexual assault by multiple Tea users cited as one example. The service currently has multiple employees, which suggests there is plenty of demand — though its founder did not go into too many specifics of how the business works. It isn’t the first company to enter this line of work, and it is unlikely to be the last.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…