Weekly New/Digital Media (51)

Tinder bans man for life for sending woman racist messageTinder


Summary: "Dating app publishes open letter condemning user for racially abusing a woman he met on the platform"
"Tinder has very publicly banned a man for life after he racially abused an Asian woman."
Screenshots of the conversation(posted on facebook) circulated drawing wide spread condemnation.  Other women also can forward saying the man had made abusive comments to them too. On Wednesday, Tinder posted an open letter addressed to the man “and anyone who behaves like you”, announcing it had banned him for life
Key facts/ opinions:

  • They show him lose his temper after the woman stops responding, using a racist term of abuse and saying: “Next time don’t give our your number dumb cunt.”
  • Rosette Pambakian, Tinder’s vice-president, communications and brand, says: I was personally offended by what you said. Your words to that woman were an assault, not only on her, but on all of us. Every day, we work to rid our ecosystem of bad actors like you. Why anyone would choose to go out into the world and spread hate I will never understand, but you do not have that choice on Tinder. Hate is not an option and we will continue to fight it wherever it rears its ugly head.
  • Tinder has banned users before for abuse or harassment, but this appears to be the first time it has targeted a specific user in one of its blogposts.
  • Pambakian said Tinder wanted to send “a very loud and clear message that we don’t tolerate abusive behaviour on our platform”.
  • She added: “We encourage anyone who has encountered this type of behaviour to report the user immediately so we can take swift action to remove them from our platform.
  • Last year Tinder’s rival Bumble posted an open letter to a man who used its platform to rant about “feminist cancer” to a woman who had asked what he did for a living.


My opinion:

This seems to be a competitive move from Tinder after a rival app managed to name and shame a user which probably elicited a positive response towards the app. This is a great example of how social media is used to share and trend, in the case simply putting the abusive message on Facebook made it go viral. The power of this was that it raised awareness and made it easier for other people to recongise and come forward with this mans behavior towards them in the past. Creating a sense of collective audience power. This would have had a very negative impact on the brand image of tinder so they had to react in a powerful and equal manner to the awareness this created causing them to also make a response that had the ability to go viral, one viral response to respond to another to keep balance. This is highlighting the sheer power the audiences now have but also highlighting how media institutions are changing the way the exert their power (with a little free marketing too)

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