Online Dating Fired For Sexual Harassment

OK Cucumber is an illustrated series of greetings and pickup lines from popular online dating sites. It is presented as a graphic survey to reflect on the experience of online dating as a racialized subject, using drawing as both a tool of contemplation and an embodied response. Amy was sexually assaulted three years ago, and we matched on Tinder in June. It started when Amy, who lives in Yellowknife, agreed to go for coffee with a man named Paul. When Paul finally stopped the car, Amy refused to get out, sensing something was horribly wrong. Paul tried to pull her out of the car. Then, he forced himself on top of her, kissing her and pulling at her clothes. Amy fought back, screaming at him to stop touching her and take her home. Amy got out of the truck, and Paul drove away, leaving her stranded and alone on the trail at night. Amy met Paul on the popular online dating site Plenty of Fish. Online dating websites and the mobile apps that followed have made dating and hook-ups more convenient than ever. But conversations have emerged about how toxic these spaces can become for women and marginalized people. The technology makes it easy to forge meaningful connections with people—and to mistreat them. Using accounts on different dating apps and swiping on users across the country, I searched for people who wanted to share their experiences with sexual harassment. But sexual harassment and assault are social problems—and a culture shift is required if things are ever going to get better. Online dating websites like Plenty of Fish and OKCupid have been around since the early s, initially functioning as classified ads for potential mates.

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She sued Tinder, founded Bumble and now, at 30, is the CEO of a $3 billion dating empire

In , capitalizing on smartphone geo-location settings, bisexual men connect with other men in their area. Tinder took to Twitter to accuse Sales of unfair reporting. Identifying harassment, however, is complicated by the fact that many users overtly seek out sexual experiences. Divergent user preferences—for hook-ups, for long-term relationships, for one-night stands—can result in unpleasant interactions when expectations collide. Anecdotal evidence seems to support these findings. Bridget, who goes to college in P. When Bianca, from Outaouais, Que. The fact that some men treat women like sex objects is not exactly groundbreaking. But the internet can provide a separation from reality that emboldens users to say things they would never even consider in person. Even Adshade, who has a Tinder account of her own, has been flabbergasted by what men have said to her on the platform. Most users can brush off an offensive message or two, but faced with relentless or vindictive advances, the impact can be severe. Repeated unpleasant interactions can also provoke defensive changes in behaviour. After numerous men sent one woman I spoke to lewd comments about her breasts, she self-consciously cropped the pictures on her Tinder profile so that she was only visible from the neck up. Victim-blaming is a common facet of harassment. Fed up with what she perceived to be toxic user culture on Tinder—and in tandem with a sexual harassment lawsuit she launched against the company—co-founder Whitney Wolfe left the app to forge her own path. Her brainchild, Bumble, is a self-proclaimed feminist dating app: It gives women the exclusive ability to start conversations with their matches. Alongside other policies and campaigns, the company has also proven impressively willing to publicly shame harassers on their platform. The efforts of apps like Bumble recognize something important: Though dating apps can facilitate harassment, they can also help stop it.Because men on Bumble wait for women to make the first move, they might think the women who do so are looking explicitly for sexual encounters—which is why Lena believes some men have been aggressively forward once she reached out to say hi. When users log onto dating apps, they do so without shedding their pre-existing conceptions about how the world works. Bianca told me that her negative reactions to unsolicited advances have sometimes caused men to blame her for their own bad behaviour. What do you expect? The wonderful thing about apps like Grindr, Adshade points out, is that they can help marginalized people connect with one another in a way that may not be possible in real life. Simultaneously, marginalized people can find themselves particularly vulnerable targets for online perpetrators. Users on dating apps can direct bigotry toward queer, racialized, or disabled people by pestering them with offensive comments or questions, ultimately making the platforms more difficult to navigate for people who experience multiple forms of oppression. Four women who identify as lesbian or bisexual told me about being constantly pressured for threesomes by both men and women on dating apps. Natalie, who lives in the Greater Toronto Area and whose name has been changed, is frequently propositioned for threesomes. Transgender and non-binary people are also frequently sexualized and targeted with intrusive lines of questioning. Much of the harassment marginalized people experience online mirrors what they go through in real life. Some users I spoke to felt they were regarded as inferior, which in some cases has led to them feeling excluded from the dating scene altogether. But when people mistake her as white, they treat her with much more respect. Kristen, who lives in Brampton, Ont. On dating apps, she gets intrusive questions, like whether she uses a wheelchair or needs a hip replacement; in real life, people just stare. When I asked Amy if she ever tried to track Paul from Plenty of Fish down, she told me she was too afraid. If dating apps already struggle to control behaviour on their platforms, it can be virtually impossible to intervene when users go offline. Amy is far from the only person I spoke with who experienced or was threatened with assault. Though Joe filed a report with the police, he ultimately decided not to press charges. In , the Vancouver Police Department VPD launched a public safety campaign focused on online dating and alerting the public of ways to avoid dangerous situations.

ONLINE SEXUAL HARASSMENT

Adshade has publicly criticized that campaign, as many of the situations the VPD highlighted—including a woman who met her romantic partner online and later found out he had HIV—could just as easily occur when people meet in person. A week after I spoke with one of my sources, she emailed me out of the blue. After one of her matches sexually assaulted her, she finally decided to delete Tinder. Could Plenty of Fish really have prevented someone like Paul from assaulting Amy? This is not to suggest that apps are relieved of all responsibility toward their users. Certainly, facets of online dating can aggravate existing risks. Elements of anonymity on certain apps make it difficult to hold users accountable for their terrible actions. Adshade points out that, unlike Plenty of Fish and OKCupid, apps like Tinder and Bumble require users to sign up with Facebook, adding an element of verification that promotes user safety. The other side of that coin is that an easily identifiable Facebook profile or a synchronized Instagram account can put users at risk of being tracked down. After Rose, who lives in Toronto, posted a selfie to her Instagram story, one of her Tinder matches figured out where she worked, showed up and watched her until she got security involved. Specific features of the apps can also make it easier for stalkers to get their way. One Grindr user took a picture of Jordan and sent it to him while he was working his restaurant shift in Montreal. Initial sparks on apps like Tinder might too foster a sense of one-sided familiarity that makes users feel entitled to attention in real time.

An ongoing investigation

Stephanie, who lives in Fredericton, was once followed home by a Tinder match who recognized her in a bar. But new technologies, as disruptors of everyday life, can foster fears beyond our wildest imaginations, resulting in scare stories that are too often fuelled by misinformation. A quick Google search revealed the story was a viral hoax. When I asked my sources whether the apps they use could have made things safer for them, many said no. Given the onslaught of misogyny and bigotry they receive in real life, many women and marginalized people on dating apps expect to be objectified or targeted. The largest dating apps have hordes of staff working behind the scenes, imposing a sort of governance on their users, and relatively contained online spaces can provide a solid landscape for social change. Most dating websites and apps have robust policies in place to protect their users from harassment, and the platforms themselves from liability. There are also specific ways apps can tailor their services to their consumers. Users I spoke to had a number of suggestions for improvement: allowing users more agency over what information they share, sorting users into categories depending on what kinds of interactions they are looking for, and making information about consent more visible on the apps themselves. The efforts of apps to address harassment have often been met with mixed results. The company, however, faced backlash for a public safety campaign that appeared to be focused exclusively on harassment faced by women and perpetrated by men, ignoring non-heterosexual users. Critics were unimpressed. An overwhelming number of my sources wanted apps to take reports more seriously. In a context where many users are comfortable with sexual attention, others may feel entitled to it; the boundaries that would exist in real life tend to evaporate when people take to their screens. Though most users I contacted on dating apps were eager to share their stories, I was also mocked for my efforts when I posted a call for submissions in Facebook groups. Some people laughed off the idea that consent could even apply on dating apps, and one user told me in far less cordial terms that I was going through an awful lot of effort to get laid. Underlying the resistance to being proactive about this problem, there appears to be one logical way for users to stop harassment on their own: unmatch or block the people that are causing them harm. Still, many users reported unmatching or blocking people who simply found them on other social media sites. Focusing on the responsibilities of users also places the onus on them to take precautions.

Finally, women are calling out toxic online dates. Now to target the apps themselves

But apps that foster certain digital dynamics, and certainly apps that make users pay for their services, have an obligation to the people who occupy them. My career as a Tinder journalist is over, and not by choice. A week and a half into my reporting, Tinder suspended my account and placed it under review indefinitely. It is disappointing, not to mention ironic, that Tinder suspended a journalist for using their platform to report on harassment under the same policies that are supposed to protect their users. When I tried to make those stories public, Tinder pulled the plug. Apps can do better—and people can too. Technology is part of our lives, and dating apps have a huge role to play in fostering modern romance. For better or for worse, online dating is here to stay. We should embrace the innovation dating apps have brought about while insisting that they do more to ensure their platforms are equitable for everyone. I hope that one day, online spaces will be hers too. As a reporter, her most in-depth stories have engaged with the ways new technologies can address social justice problems—and how innovation for the better can sometimes make things worse. Contingent freedom. Books behind bars. Blood Feud. Policy prejudice. Here she was, one of the top female CEOs in tech, a founder who had created one of the largest dating apps in the world out of the ashes of her own humiliation. Yet none of it felt like she thought it would. Part of it was the stress of the initial public offering IPO , a moment she had imagined for so long that it felt almost as surreal as her wedding day. But Wolfe Herd, 31, was also annoyed at the way her story was being told.

Much of the coverage focused on her experience years ago as a co-founder at the dating app Tinder, where Wolfe Herd was allegedly harassed by an executive who was also her boyfriend, got dumped and ousted from the company, and went on to sue for sexual harassment. On the day she was supposed to be talking about her empire, Wolfe Herd found herself describing the men she had endured before building it. Except that mess—her history of toxic relationships, the misogyny of tech—is exactly why Bumble exists. In an online dating landscape where women—and particularly women of color—are routinely bullied and harassed, Wolfe Herd set out to build the closest thing to a safe space for digital romance. I engineered an ecosystem of healthy male relationships in my life. Wolfe Herd occupies the middle of a Venn diagram of the ongoing national reckoning with sexual harassment and the push to regulate human behavior on the Internet. By that February morning in Austin, Bumble was a dating app, a business-networking bazaar and a friend-finding tool that has engineered 8. Like some other dating apps, the company makes its profit through subscriptions and in-app purchases that allow users to boost the reach of their profiles, extend the clock on their matches most expire after 24 hours and go back to options they might have missed. But what Bumble is really selling is a sense of control over the mysterious alchemy of human relationships. Wolfe Herd sees Bumble less as a dating app, a social platform or a tech company than as a brand. After Donald Trump, after COVID, much of its messaging sounds stale and exclusive in the face of so many other massive inequalities. And of course, she knows how to brand this too. In the five years I have been interviewing her, Wolfe Herd has never quite developed that hard and shiny exterior so many successful people get, repeating practiced lines like human press releases. Bumble has been criticized as a Tinder spin-off and a feminist marketing ploy. Some former employees say the company felt like a sorority in the early days. And yet, in a world scarred by the radical liberty of the Internet—where truth is in the eye of the beholder, hate speech flourishes, and women are routinely harassed—Bumble is one of the few tech companies that seems to care more about safety than freedom.

She sued Tinder, founded Bumble and now, at 30, is the CEO of a $3 billion dating empire

It is the first major social platform to embrace behavioral guardrails and content moderation as part of its business model. Her husband, oil heir Michael Herd, maxed out donations to Trump in and The Bumble headquarters in Austin is nicknamed the Hive. The building is bright yellow, and nearly everything inside is some shade of goldenrod or canary or banana. The phone booth and bookshelves and pantry are all shaped like honeycombs, and the walls are full of puns like Bee Kind. It looks more like a concept than an office, a workplace for people whose job includes posting pictures of their workplace. On the morning she took her company public, Wolfe Herd approached a Nasdaq lectern wearing a pineapple-colored suit on loan from Stella McCartney and yellow Manolo Blahniks. Bobby started fidgeting and pulling at her hair. The team was lined up behind her, wearing yellow, clapping in unison, as Bobby picked this instant to scratch at her face, and her smile froze because she was thinking that her darling baby boy was about to poke her eye out at the exact second she took her company public. But then the bell rang, and yellow balloons and confetti dropped from the sky. Almost immediately, Wolfe Herd changed her clothes. She had willed all this to fruition on sheer force of vision, but she was not at peace. Other tech founders got their starts hunched over keyboards in darkened Ivy League dorm rooms, but Wolfe Herd has never written a line of code.According to friends and family, her high school years were notable primarily for an abusive boyfriend she dated on and off. Friends say the experience was formative. On one of her first days of school, she met Williamson, who was working at a boutique near campus. But at its core, a sorority is a brand: a constellation of events and T-shirts and rules, a set of expectations around how to look and how to behave and whom to hang out with, all designed to tell the world what kind of girl you are. After graduating in with a degree in international studies, Wolfe Herd got a job in Los Angeles working for a tiny company called Cardify, an app that allowed users to swipe through retail loyalty cards. Some Cardify employees then applied the swipe mechanism to dating and started Tinder, and Wolfe Herd became a co-founder focused on marketing. Her duties involved touring college campuses to advertise the app with pizza parties and free thongs and flyers. Around the same time, she began dating another co-founder, Justin Mateen. But things at Tinder went sour. Her relationship with Mateen unraveled, which meant her position at the company became precarious. Asked about the allegations, a Tinder spokesperson noted that every executive named in the lawsuit has left the company. In the beginning , Bumble was only a brand. At 24, branding was the thing Wolfe Herd knew best. At first, scarred by the online harassment she endured after the Tinder blowup, Wolfe Herd wanted to make an app where women could give each other compliments. But then Andreev approached her with an idea to start a dating app; Wolfe Herd said she would only do it if women could be in control. She hired Caroline Roche, a fellow sorority girl at SMU, and together they spent their weekends traveling to Texas campuses, bringing free yellow Hanky Panky underwear to the sororities and free beer to the fraternities, telling the fraternity brothers that all the girls were looking for their next formal dates on Bumble. She branded Bumble as a friendlier dating app for women. Soon, they moved the company into a small two-bedroom apartment, where the bathtub was filled with Bumble merchandise. At this point, the app was still being built. The company had a strong sorority vibe, four early employees say.

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Wolfe Herd acknowledges that the early company could be cliquey, and says she tried hard to address the gossipy culture. But she also says much of it was out of her control. Wolfe Herd says that her deal structure with Andreev meant that giving up more equity would mean sacrificing her board seat. A Bumble representative followed up to say every current employee has equity in the company. Other critics noted that her partnership with Andreev meant that Wolfe Herd never faced the fundraising challenges most female CEOs are forced to navigate. But many employees recall a CEO who strove to be thoughtful, even during the difficult early days of a startup. Wolfe Herd was not at the party. She thought she might be judged, but she was pleasantly surprised. On another occasion, Wolfe Herd surprised her with a pair of Valentino heels that arrived at her door, because she knew Mick loved shoes. There were growing pains. Part of her vision for that brand was to take Bumble beyond the realm of dating. In , the company launched Bumble BFF, which allowed people to use the app to make platonic friendships. When I tried the feature, I found it full of people whose profiles said they had just moved to a new city, or were looking for yoga buddies, or wanted to meet fellow dog owners. The following year brought the launch of Bumble Bizz, designed to help people match with potential business contacts. Bumble introduced identity verification to weed out trolls, banned guns in photos, and rolled out new guidelines around harassment and body shaming. Wolfe Herd knows changing behavior on one app is only a small part of a larger cultural shift. Because the Internet has megapower to shift behavior—if you use it for good.

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In , Bumble logged more than , incidents that violated user guidelines, according to a company representative, which resulted in consequences ranging from written warnings to temporary suspensions to users being permanently blocked from the platform. A Bumble representative, citing legal reasons, declined to provide a breakdown of which types of punishments were implemented for which infractions, but said it has banned far more than , people from the platform overall. The company uses artificial-intelligence programs to scan for violations like hate speech, even when no users report the behavior. The goal is to clean up the platform without relying on user reports, and to identify people who are likely to behave badly before they actually do it. Each time a violation is reported by the algorithm, Norris says, it gets referred to a team of 2, human moderators who decide whether the behavior merits blocking. I wanted to see how long it would take Bumble to match me with the person I had already married—and whether the behavioral guardrails it touts actually worked. I found him in about a dozen swipes. Mark swiped past two old roommates, three women he knew from work, and two women with my exact name and age. His hand was starting to hurt. It took him almost two days to find me. When he did, I immediately started harassing him.

Tinder Is Target of Sexual Harassment Lawsuit

Trap baited, I signed off Bumble and read an article about how white supremacists use Facebook to recruit new members. Once upon a time, brands were the things that got you to buy a particular car, or try a particular soap, or feed your kid Heinz baked beans. The brand was in service of the product. But in the oversaturated, superadvertised, hypermarketed attention economy, branding has slipped the bounds of advertising and become something broader, more amorphous—a statement of how to be, not just what to buy. The Kardashian empire is rooted in branding. An entire ecosystem of brand influencers is raking in billions on Instagram and TikTok. Trump rode branding to the pinnacle of American politics. Why should tech be any different? I thought she would say Facebook, the behemoth of digital socializing. Instead, true to her old childhood fascination, she said she wanted Bumble to one day be like Disney. There are some Disney movies that tank and they suck. But that brand makes you feel something, right? This feeling is her product. This is her car, her soap, her baked beans. More than relationships, or friendships, or in-app purchases, Wolfe Herd is selling the feeling of power to the powerless, a sense of order in an online universe that so frequently seems lawless. That means visualizing a better Internet, and promoting a safer version of it. Write to Charlotte Alter at charlotte. Presented By. Wolfe Herd, 31, is the youngest woman ever to take a U.You May Also Like. Should Employers Foot the Bill? Study finds three-quarters of users surveyed experienced online sexual violence while one-third reported in-person incidents. A new study of dating apps has revealed high rates of sexual violence, stalking, assault and unwanted sharing of explicit images. The researchers behind the study said such apps need to protect users better, with precautions such as easier reporting processes and tougher ID checks to enforce bans. The Australian Institute of Criminology survey of 9, app users found three-quarters were victims of some form of online sexual violence in the past five years. Sign up to receive an email with the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning. The vast majority of the 71 non-binary respondents were also victims. The abuse was not isolated — users said they experienced sexual violence online and in person multiple times from different perpetrators. Almost half the victims said an abuser unmatched or blocked them, or deleted their own profile, in an apparent attempt to avoid being caught. The study said dating apps should prioritise safety via easier reporting processes, tougher ID verification to ban perpetrators and censorship of explicit images. The histories of conversations between users also need to be stored by the platforms to help victims who report abuse to the authorities, the authors wrote. Dating apps should implement easier reporting processes, tougher ID verification and censorship of explicit images, the study says. This article is more than 1 year old. Study finds three-quarters of users surveyed experienced online sexual violence while one-third reported in-person incidents Follow our Australia news live blog for the latest updates Get our free news app , morning email briefing or daily news podcast. New affirmative consent campaign tackles issue head-on, experts say.

Meet the Tinder Co-Founder Trying to Change Online Dating Forever

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How Whitney Wolfe Herd Turned a Vision of a Better Internet Into a Billion-Dollar Brand

Browse Companies:. A software engineer from Australia was fired last week after two women made public the abusive and misogynistic messages they said he sent to them on dating apps and social media platforms, The Daily Mail reported. The man repeatedly insisted that Sanderson come to his home, but she says she declined his requests. After articulating that she did not wish to waste his time, Sanderson received several cruel messages on multiple social media platforms — so she decided to speak out on Instagram. Sanderson went on to share videos of Tom's voice messages on the app, in which he can be heard calling her a "fat fing pig" and "fing ugly. The CEO did the right thing and acted quickly, so I kindly ask you to stop emailing them. This is what happens when you say NO or call out a man for being disrespectful!!! You apparently earn yourself the right to get verbally abused and fat shamed on more than one platform. I managed to video call and he answered and appeared to in fact be this very man in the picture All I can say is what a privileged misogynistic PIG. Sanderson's photos and videos sparked outrage in the comments section from viewers who called her Tinder match's behavior "horrendous" and "evil. Feminist author and broadcaster Clementine Ford shared Sanderson's story with her , Instagram followers. This is what male abuse looks like," Ford wrote in an Instagram post.Ford also posted the man's Instagram handle — which identified him as a year-old software engineer from Bondi named Thomas McGuirk — and encouraged Instagram users to avoid engaging with him on any platform. The Instagram profile has since been deleted. The brewery manager wrote in a post that she had matched with McGuirk on Tinder a month prior. Ultimately, she said, she felt that the two didn't have chemistry. In several messages that Hinds shared online, McGuirk shamed Hinds for her sexual history and appeared to threaten to show up at her place of business. I met this guy on tinder A month ago. And when I said we don't have chemistry, this is what happened. This is disgusting and horrendous behaviour. I feel absolutely horrific and violated I ever did anything. He was nice, until told no. Since I posted about this I've had 3 girls come forward and tell me they had similar. In London, as well as Sydney. So he has been everywhere. How has tinder not stopped Tom yet!? It's time to put an end to this misogynistic bullshit. Since posting photos of the interactions to Instagram, Hinds wrote in an updated caption that three other women came forward to share a similar experience with McGuirk.