How Tinder Reinforces and Amplifies Abuse
Tinder is failing its users.
For women on Tinder, harassment and abuse is commonplace.
I interviewed women to better understand the experiences that make them feel uneasy, uncomfortable, or unsafe on Tinder, what I refer to as intimate intrusions, for my PhD research.
My research shows that Tinder’s practices, policies, and design amplify and reinforce intimate intrusions.
For years, social and popular media have documented dating app users’ experiences surrounding unsolicited sexual advances, ‘dick pics’, and physical and sexual violence after meeting in physical settings, among other interactions. The Instagrams Tinder Nightmares and Bye Felipe, for instance, document messages sent between Tinder and other dating apps’ instant messaging services.
Tinder fosters attitudes that underpin everyday intrusive behaviours. This is important to consider, given that gender-based violence research shows us how these types of attitudes lead men to physically abuse women.
Here’s how it happens:
Since Tinder’s inception in 2012, the service has promoted ineffective — and potentially harmful — approaches to women’s experiences of intrusion facilitated by the service. In 2017, for instance, Tinder launched Reactions — animated images, which users could send through the platform’s instant messaging service. The now discontinued feature, in Tinder’s opinion, gave users an easy and fun way to ‘call out’ men’s ‘douchey’ behaviour. The platform created negative and positive Reactions; however, only women could access and send the negative animations. These images included an eye roll and what was supposed to resemble throwing a drink in someone’s face.
Reactions was a grossly ineffective mechanism for various reasons. Perhaps most importantly, Reactions may have actually contributed to further harm. The women I spoke to overwhelmingly thought Reactions was an inappropriate way to respond to men’s behaviour, and one which could actually escalate intrusive behaviours. One interviewee noted:
“you’re almost fuelling the fire for them to then react to you.”
This concern highlights the woman’s understanding that everyday experiences of intrusion can quickly escalate. The woman’s account also shows how the feature might have reinforced male users’ decisions to respond in such a way — and importantly, in a way that they may not have without the feature. For this reason, Reactions could have shaped how users engaged with the platform and other users.
Reactions served to normalise men’s ‘douchey’ behaviour. After sending a negative Reaction, the users were still free to communicate through the app. This sent a message to users that the behaviour did not warrant a report to Tinder or unmatch on the user’s part. Further still, Tinder downplayed the impact intrusions can have on women by labelling men’s intrusive behaviour as ‘douchey.’ For the women I interviewed, Tinder’s positioning of men’s behaviour did not correlate with the impact intrusions had on them. The majority of the women described deleting their Tinder accounts after experiences that made them feel uncomfortable. And for some, the intimate intrusions they experienced on Tinder contributed to their distrust of men more generally. Despite Tinder’s downplaying of ‘douchey’ behaviour, these findings significantly demonstrate how such interactions can have a cumulative impact on women.
Finally, Reactions placed the responsibility on users to respond to men’s ‘douchey’ behaviour. By positioning the feature as an empowering response to the behaviour, it concealed Tinder’s inaction to the problem. This move enabled Tinder to distance the platform from its users’ behaviour, and — ostensibly — justified its failure to create meaningful safety mechanisms. Despite the discontinuation of Reactions, it did tell us something about the way Tinder responds to intrusions on the service.
Another way that Tinder reinforces and amplifies women’s experiences of intrusion is through its connection to other digital media platforms — what it terms cross-platform linking. Tinder’s connection to Instagram, for instance, makes it easier for users to access the personal information and inner social circles of other users. Of the women I spoke to who had linked their Instagram accounts to their Tinder profiles, they all described removing these links after intrusive experiences. One interviewee recounted receiving unsolicited topless photos from a man through Instagram’s instant messaging service. Importantly, this woman hadn’t even matched with the man on Tinder. While only Tinder users who mutually indicate interest in one another can communicate through the platform, cross-platform linking made it easier for the man to contact her through Instagram. The features of other social media platforms, then, add further complications to women’s experiences.
For those who do match, the limitations of Tinder reinforce users’ decisions to communicate in other spaces. Despite Tinder encouraging users to stay on the platform, the inability to send personal photographs through the service led my interviewees to interact with users through Snapchat. For one of my interviewees who did this, a Tinder user tracked her location through Snapchat’s ‘Snap Map’ feature, which shares connected users’ live location data. The availability of her location data enabled this user to stalk her with extraordinary accuracy. My findings importantly highlight how social media companies need to be cognisant of the way that their platforms interact with other services in ways that might exacerbate risks to users.
So far, Tinder’s responses to intrusive behaviours have been manifestly inadequate.
Tinder’s reporting mechanism does nothing to deter, and potentially reinforces, intrusive behaviour. Since Tinder’s decision-making is opaque, my interviewees were unaware of what steps the platform had taken to respond to their reports. To make things worse, one interviewee recalled seeing reported users on the app, despite reporting and unmatching them. Tinder’s inaction made her question the severity of her experiences. Unresponsiveness in the face of violations of the platform’s rules sends a powerful message that the behaviour is acceptable. At the same time, it reinforces the idea that women’s reports are unwarranted.
The good news: Tinder can improve its service for women.
Certainly, effecting meaningful change will be difficult and resource-intensive. To get started, here are two steps that Tinder and other similar dating apps could take:
1. Engage with anti-violence against women experts
Women run into problems that are complex and Tinder’s moderation system is not nuanced enough to deal with the kind of complex problems faced by its users. Tinder could improve this by engaging with anti-violence against women organisations to help design reporting systems that work better for such problems, and to ensure protocols are in place to better respond to women’s experiences.
2. Engage with women who use the service
One of the key problems is that women do not think they are being heard. Changes made to the service should be informed by those who use it. For instance, Tinder could engage with users to better understand the features they would like to use.
“We are accountable for the communities we create, and if we want to take credit for the magical moments that happen when people connect with each other online, then we have to take responsibility for the negative experiences that we enable” — Anil Dash.
Dating apps can’t pick and choose what experiences they are accountable for. Given Tinder’s role in reinforcing and amplifying abuse, it has an undeniable role in improving women’s experiences on the service. We need action now.
