Tinder's Authenticity Concerns

Tinder is one of the premier dating apps that exist to date. There are over 1 billion swipes registered per day. This is a ridiculous statistic that needs to be further looked into in order to provide some contextual information about the nature of these swipes. Who is swiping left and who is swiping right are minor questions and, Tinder’s algorithm has dealt with these question. One of the larger questions that tinder has relates back to these 1.6 billion swipes, but it has not become who is producing these swipes. The problem of fraudulent personas along with spam accounts is something that greatly threatens the future of tinder’s worth.

Mobile dating has become a socially accepted practice in our community, however five years ago this probably was not the case. If we think back to class, many people actually put their hands up to indicate that they have used some form of online dating. The amount of hands reduced when the question was posed by Dr. Herman, who has met up with someone they met on a dating site. I think that a significant amount of people had never met up with someone because of the idea of someone misrepresenting themselves. The chance that someone has digitally changed their image to appear more attractive is almost certain in this day and age. The concerns more heavily lie in the idea that someone is pretending to be someone they are not over tinder. As Van Dijck stated, this is where users are either empowered to do this, or constrained to become victims (pg. 33). Mobile dating has intensified the ways in which potential dates are misrepresenting themselves, and has raised very real concerns about the authenticity of its users (Duguay pg. 2). The idea that a user is being lured into a “catfish” is not only a concern but a real possibility. Many people who exhibit this type of behaviour feel the need to behave this way do to personal issues (Duguay pg. 7). Tinder has provided a space that allows this type of behaviour to be centralized inside a dating app.

Tinder’s platform makes this type of behaviour almost impossible to rectify, as all the information needed to sign up is particularly easy to falsify. This does not extinguish the importance of this for the ownership group, it is a very real concern that can affect a lot of tinder users. The actor-network theory that Van Dijck states is absolutely central, needs to be incorporated by tinder to find a solution to users concerns (pg. 26).

Duguay, S. (2016). Dressing up Tinderella: interrogating authenticity claims on the mobile dating app Tinder. Information, Communication & Society, 1-17.

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