Tinder's PR just went ballistic on Twitter over a Vanity Fair expose
The tech company's PR just went on a 30+ tweet tweetstorm lambasting the magazine for a recent feature story in the September issue of Vanity Fair.
The article, titled "Tinder and the Dawn of the 'Dating Apocalypse,'" uses Tinder to talk about the effects of technology and smartphone dating apps on youth "hook-up" culture and dating.
Using a series of anecdotes of millennials at bars, big city hangouts, and colleges, Nancy Jo Sales paints a picture of Tinder and its competitors (Bumble, Hinge, OkCupid, etc) as signaling a death knell for modern courtship.
While some frustration may have been warranted - the piece, after all, reads like so many trend pieces on dating in our technology/social media-obsessed world - Tinder went a little overboard.
It all started when Tinder's PR people took issue with a tidbit the author tweeted about the supposed number of Tinder users who are married.
And then, the tweetstorm began:
The tweetstorm goes on for some 20-25+ more tweets. Check them all out here.
In the Vanity Fair article, the authors queried groups of guys - young professionals who view their own use of Tinder as sport, measuring each other's success with the app based on metrics like, "Who's slept with the best, hottest girls," as one man put it.
Some of the women interviewed for the article are considerably less aggressive about hooking up, but can still be found at bars and restaurants diving into various dating apps on their phones rather than talking to people outside the group they're with.
The article makes the argument that apps like Tinder are "ruining" the concept of traditional dating. In its defense, Tinder says it's not just about hooking up, it's about "creating connections" - 8 billion so far - of the kind "that never would have been made."