Are they lying? Verifying Tinder profile information
The Tinder Profile: a space where you can provide your first name, age, 9 pictures, a job title, educational institution, and 500 characters of your own wit and charm to inform potential romantic partners about yourself. Users make split second judgements about their potential matches based on very limited information, often getting into almost rhythmic patterns of swiping left (no) or right (yes). Many times, users also struggle with knowing that someone’s self-provided information is truly accurate. A common discussion is men lying about their heights to convince people they are taller or women heavily editing their photos to change their visual appearance. Connections are made under these impressions that could turn out to not be entirely true. So how do you know if a Tinder profile is an accurate representation of someone?
Well, in a highly digital world how much information could you find out about this person if you tried. I am oftentimes the person that my friends ask to be “their personal FBI agent”: I find out information about their romantic partners online. This has included everything from discovering if a past partner is in a new relationship or a potential partner’s interests.
As our infosphere and cyberspace continue to expand exponentially, the friction that previously made these sorts of things difficult to find has drastically decreased. As described by Luciano Floridi, friction is the challenges that one faces when seeking out information. Examples of friction like paywalls still serve as obstacles, but many people can find ways around these if they have the right technological skills (Floridi). For many young people who have lived a majority of their teen and adult years on social media, there is relatively low friction in finding basic information about a person. This can be helpful in verifying information provided on online dating profiles and more information enters cyberspace daily.
A lot of information can be discovered through just a connection on Snapchat or Instagram, tools that many people access daily. Jobs can be verified through LinkedIn, locations through Snapchat or Facebook, etc. Of course, just like meeting a stranger in person it might take a few dates to figure out if you like the “real” them, but the internet is a good place to start if you want to make sure they’re not a complete liar.
References
Floridi, Luciano. (2010). Chapter 1 Ethics after the Information Revolution. In The. Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
