Friday, 16 December 2016

Governing Hookups - How well can it be done?

  
As most people know Tinder is often not the place many individuals go to find love and is more popularly used for hook ups and joking around with other users. Tinder is the wild wild west of dating applications as insults and crude comments fly freely. However, there are some rules and regulations or governance model, as Jose Van Dick calls them, put in place in order to ensure the app runs as smoothly as possible. 

Van Dijck (2013) explains governance as implicit and explicit rules in order to regulate users;
explicit rules are also used to regulate claims of property, privacy and acceptable behavior in terms of service agreements and privacy policies (p. 38).

Tinder just like every other social media site or application has a lengthy Terms of service agreement that well many agree too, nobody actually reads. Luckily I took the time to go through it and find some interesting sections within the agreement to share. Tinder really does do their best to cover all of their bases legally and ensure they will not get sued in any way what so ever.

First off all, individuals on Tinder must have a Facebook account to be eligible. Then comes the age requirement, “You must be at least 18 years of age to create an account on Tinder and use the Service”(https://www.gotinder.com/terms). This section may be the most broken rule in the terms of service agreement, well you can not set your age under 18 very often in the users bio they will state they are actually 16 or 17 and nothing is done about it.  This promotes the sexual exploitation of minors to older individuals.Which could give tinder a bad reputation and is why Section 8 of their terms of services comes in handy, stating, users assume all liability for interactions with others off the application (https://www.gotinder.com/terms).

The company even says if you die well subscribed to Tinder that you are entitled to a full refund (https://www.gotinder.com/terms), and well the application is primarily for younger individuals, you never know...




These terms and services really are put in place to protect the users, however, more importantly are there to protect the company itself. Everybody who has used tinder knows how many rude sexual comments are made and how many spam/fake accounts there really are. These actions are said to be prohibited in the companies terms of use but rarely in someone monitoring these issues. 






Why is nothing done? The rules are put in place by tinder but the issue still exists. Terry Flew (2015) argues governance is, "more easily adopted in relatively smaller scale user communities than in the vast global social media platforms" (p. 2), proving how the pure size and reach of Tinder makes it difficult to regulate. When it is a small group of individuals there is also self regulation that is involved. However, with tinder user often feel like there will be no consequences too their actions.

All in all these governing rules are put in place to make sure the company does not get in trouble legally and that everybody using the application can be held accountable for their actions...and many who have used the app know individuals actions can be quite questionable on tinder like seen in the video below. 




Works Cited

Flew, T. (2015). Social Media + Society. Social media governance. 1-2. doi:10.117/2056305115578136

https://www.gotinder.com/terms

Van Dijck, J. (2013). The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


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