Is Tinder Racist?
Racial bias in dating app algorithms
One of my Black friends who moved to Colorado recently lamented to me that none of the women the dating apps were matching him with were attractive.
“I thought Denver was supposed to be full of beautiful people,” he told me.
It wasn’t just that. He wondered how nearly half of his matches were Latino or Black in a city where Black people make up less than 9% of the population and whites make up 65% of the city of Denver and over 80% in the larger Denver county.
He’s not the first one to mention this.
A Black female friend suggested the same thing to me years ago.
I have mixed feelings about the apps anyway. On the one hand, you meet people you’d otherwise not meet. On the other hand, you meet people you’d otherwise not meet — if you catch my drift.
OkCupid founder Christian Rudder was once asked by a user why they were getting so many unattractive people in their match deck. He half-joked, “If you think your matches are ugly, that’s probably because you’re ugly.”
Before you get too bent out of shape, we ought not to be overly concerned about whether an algorithm wants to make love to you.
