Protests Cause Dating Apps to Question Ethnicity Filters

Dating apps like Grindr, Hinge and OkCupid have been weighing whether or not to keep an ethnicity filter on their apps in the wake of protests against police violence in the U.S. and around the world. 

According to Forbes, Grindr announced that it would be dropping the filter as an option from its app in its next update. The company posted a statement on Twitter, adding: “We will not be silent. Black Lives Mater.” But this decision created a backlash among many who saw this move as too little, too late. @guillotineshout responded: “In solidarity we are removing our racism button” is the most tech company thing I could imagine.”

Grindr had received criticism before for the ethnicity filter, but other dating apps like OkCupid and Hinge who also have them, have chosen to keep theirs.

The companies have defended their decisions. OkCupid’s global communications manager Michael Kaye said that the company has heard from minority users who like the feature, and that “most users do not set a preference.” 

“However, from user feedback, we’ve heard that this is a particularly relevant tool for black users,” said Kaye, “and what is helpful for even just one of our users benefits our entire community on OkCupid.”

Regardless of filters, racial bias is prevalent in dating apps, as AdWeek points out. A five-year study that OkCupid released in 2014 found that black people and Asian men fared the worst among the app’s 25 million users in terms of racial and gender preferences. And a similar study published the same year in Psychology of Popular Media Culture found that 80% of white dating app users only messaged other white users. Black users meanwhile, were 10 times more likely to reach out to a white person than a white user reached out to a black user.

Forbes also points towards a 2018 study by Cornell University, which looked at 25 popular dating apps and deduced that race was “innately entwined in their tech” because the apps’ algorithms worked to identify a user’s preferred ethnicity through the choices they made on the app and who they tended to message. 

The ongoing protests since the murder of George Floyd have brought attention to the pervasive problem of systemic racism and police violence toward black people and black communities. As a result, many individuals are questioning their own accountability, and are holding companies accountable for their racial biases as well. 

Dating apps responded on social media. Bumble created a detailed list of what they were doing to address the problem, including offering expanded mental health services to employees and holding internal discussions about how to respond to systemic racism on its platform. (Bumble does not have an ethnicity filter.) 

Hinge said it “has a zero-tolerance policy” for hate and threatened to ban anyone making hateful remarks on the platform. OkCupid said it would introduce new in-app questions related to racial equality and justice. Tinder (which does not have an ethnicity filter) pledged to donate to Black Lives Matter, and gay dating app Scruff said it removed its ethnicity filter in 2018 and plans to completely remove the ability for users to search by race on its app.