Do You Like "Spilling Tea" on Social Media? Here's What You Can Spill, Legally!

Are you an active Twitter user? If you are, then I bet you're already familiar with the "spill the tea" term. Recently, this term has gotten a lot of attention and has become famous.

This is because there are a bunch of people "spilling" other people's "tea". For those of you who are still confused with the meaning of it, you can see it as someone sharing other people's badness.

If we glimpse it, it seems like it's an illegal thing to do and against the law, for sure. Especially Law Number 19 of 2016 concerning Information and Electronic Transactions and its amendments. But do you know that there is some kind of information that you can spill without breaking any law?

Spill the Tea? What's That?

In the original Urban Dictionary definition, the phrase "spill the tea" is defined as "gossip or personal information belonging to someone else; the scoop; the news."

The phrase is most commonly used for gossip and to claim that your news is the most exciting. With tweets using the phrases "Give me the tea," "where's the tea," and "spill that tea," Twitter has developed into a particularly fertile breeding environment for tea.

The phrase predates the twenty-first century by a very wide margin. Many people subscribe to the popular origin story that claims women in the 18th and early 19th centuries would sip tea while giggling on their front porches. 

However, this origin hypothesis has very little to do with tea. Merriam-Webster claims that although the expression has little to do with the drink itself, it was first used in drag culture.

So in general, we can say that spilling the tea is spreading other people's ugliness, using a variety of media, like social media.

Spill the Tea and Defamation on Social Media

We all know that if we defame others, we can get reported, especially on social media. If we do that on social media like Twitter, we can get reported by people who feel harmed. 

Article 27 paragraph (3) of Law Number 11 of 2008 Concerning Information and Electronic Transactions (UU ITE) may apply to defamation on the internet or, in this case, through social media: