Jerks 'Reporting' Women Who Swipe Left On Them In Tinder, Once Again Highlighting How Content Moderation Gets Abused

from the always-another-thing dept

We keep trying to highlight (over and over and over again) how content moderation at scale is impossible to do well for a variety of reasons -- and one big one is the fact that assholes and trolls will game whatever system you put in place -- often in truly absurd ways. The latest example of this is that guys who are pissed off about women who reject them after meeting through Tinder are "reporting" the women in the app, trying to get their accounts shut down.

I had been banned from Tinder. It turns out, though, I’m far from the only woman to have been kicked off the app for no other reason than I rejected the wrong guy. Indeed, without the need for any apparent proof of wrongdoing, a new breed of scorned men have stumbled upon a particularly passive-aggressive way to say, “If I can’t have her, no one can” — tapping the report button.

Case in point: Last year, 33-year-old Amy declined to go out with a man she’d been messaging with when he started insulting her. The insults, of course, only intensified from there — with him telling her she was shaped like Slimer from Ghostbusters and that her fertility was declining. Stunned, she put her phone away. After taking a moment, she went to block him, but when she opened Tinder, her account had been banned.

Of course, as some of the article highlights, Tinder itself seems woefully (ridiculously) unprepared to deal with even the most basic instances of this kind of abuse. Tinder apparently bans accounts based on a single report and the company states that it does "not offer an appeals process at this time." The article highlights a bunch of tweets from women who all seem to have gone through a similar experience. They met a dude on Twitter, date doesn't go well, she says she'd rather not go on another date... the guy flips out, acts like an asshole, and minutes later, she's banned from the app.

The author of the article, who herself was banned from Tinder right after such an experience, found a guy who admitted to doing this.

I did, though, find one man — 26-year-old Brian — who admitted to reporting women who were unresponsive to his messages. “I’ve done this,” he confides. “It’s a huge waste of time for girls to match with you and then not reply. Like what’s the point?”

He then goes on to spout a bunch of misogynistic nonsense, apparently believing that women do this on purpose to be mean to men like him, which apparently is what he needs to convince himself that getting their accounts shut down okay.

Of course, what's left out of this discussion is a bit of the flipside. You can kind of understand why Tinder is so aggressive in banning people, because if people actually are violating its rules, the consequences could be a lot more serious, especially given that the entire point of the app is to get people to meet up in real life. If they mess that up, there will be all sorts of bad press about how Tinder failed to take down an account or something. Hell, as we've detailed, Grindr effectively got sued over this exact scenario and the plaintiff in that case recently asked the Supreme Court to hear his appeal.

That's not to say the companies can't do a better job -- they can. Having an appeals process seems like a no-brainer. But an appeals process can be gamed as well. And this is the point that we keep trying to make: it's literally impossible to do content moderation well at this kind of scale. There will always be problems and judgment calls people disagree with -- and outright abuse. In both directions. People abusing the system to take down content they don't like, and others abusing the system to keep up content or profiles that probably should be taken down. It's easy for someone to say "oh, they shouldn't do that," but no one has yet come up with a system that always gets it right and stops any such abuse. Because it's literally impossible.

Filed Under: appeals, assholes, content moderation, content moderation at scale, dating, reporting, trolls
Companies: tinder

Trademark Has Come To This: Tinder Opposes Dating App With Only One Lonely Dude On Its Dating Roster

from the a-real-threat dept

By now, Tinder is probably in the common lexicon. The dating app has been fairly successful, boasting something like 50 million people using it and managing to make something like 12 million matches per day. It's a household name, in other words, which is what makes it a bit strange to see the company bother to oppose a fairly silly trademark application by one guy who designed a dating app to get dating matches for exactly one person: himself.

Shed Simove called the app Shinder and said he built it to find himself a partner. However, when he tried to trademark it, a Notice of Threatened Opposition was filed to the Intellectual Property Office by dating giant Tinder.

"I think it's a case of a big corporate giant looking at an entrepreneur who sees the world differently and being punitive," he said. "It's unlikely that the female population will stop using Tinder and start using Shinder."

To be clear, the attempt to trademark "Shinder" itself is silly. The app was created by Shed Simove for the sole purpose of getting himself a date. He's the only dude on the roster. While the app attempts to recruit women to use it, he's the only option for them. It would be kind of funny, if it weren't so creepy. The attempt to trademark Shinder, according to Simove, was done because he's thought about white-labeling the app for any individual to use. And yes, this is every bit as dumb and probably not trademarkable as it sounds.

"If it was 'white label ' - that would mean if I chose to I could take the raw guts of the code and allow people to have their own versions. Jane could have Jinder, and so on."

Jinder? Please. The whole point of trademark law is to keep customers from being confused between products and services. There is a roughly zero chance that anyone is going to mistake Tinder, megalith in the dating app world as it is, for Shinder, an app used by almost nobody created by one guy to get himself a date. Why Tinder is even bothering with this is beyond me.

Although, because every funny story needs an even funnier punchline, Tinder was not the only one concerned.

He also received a letter from lawyers representing the elevator firm Schindler. Schindler asked him to commit to refraining from entering the elevator or escalator market.

If trademark law has gotten to this point, is it time we contemplate whether it's serving its purpose any longer?

Filed Under: dating apps, shed simove, trademark
Companies: shinder, tinder