No Screenshots, No Shirt, No Service
⤏ THE UNFORTUNATE TRUTH ABOUT DATING APPS
⤏ BY ERIKA GAJDA
I grew up incredibly online.
My older brother helped me set up my first AOL screen name in 1998, at the ripe age of 5. I sat in the AOL kids’ chat rooms answering “A/S/L?” with lies — because I was too young to even be there. By 2004, I was on Myspace, sitting on the family computer, watching Youtube’s earliest viral videos and reading about bonsai kittens (a fucked up internet hoax that instructed readers how to raise a kitten in a jar so its bones fit to the mold of the container). Like everyone else, I casually watched beheading videos and accidentally downloaded porn on Limewire instead of a Green Day song. And like a bonsai kitten, I was personally shaped by my unsupervised time on the Internet — craving the weirdest content I could find and as much of it as I could physically consume.
But because of all the weird shit I’ve seen online, and my American thirst for freedom-of-speech, nothing could prepare me for internet censorship.
“I casually watched beheading videos and accidentally downloaded porn on Limewire instead of a Green Day song. And like a bonsai kitten, I was personally shaped by my unsupervised time on the Internet.”
Around 2015, Instagram started pivoting away from its original purpose as a digital photo album, to a place where you can dump memes and random content as you please. It was that year that I started posting under the handle @swipes4daddy: a screenshot collection of Tinder conversations between me and middle-aged men. I set my preferences to age 50+ and (anonymously) exposed older dads pursuing younger women on dating apps. Being Swipes4Daddy was good fun, until the last couple years when I began to see an uptick in post censorship.
All of a sudden, every post I put up became a game of Russian roulette. With every screenshot I posted, I would immediately ask myself, will this be The One? The final post that shuts me down?
I have reached a point where I have to censor any word like “fuck,” “cock,” “dick,” “pussy,” “tits,” or anything remotely sexual — words that are only being sent to me by the dads, never the other way around. I also can’t criticize (or simply point out) what these middle-aged men look like, because that’s bullying. See here:
It all started with shadowbanning.
When the number of likes on my posts went down, I just thought people didn’t find my posts funny anymore. It was tragic, but acceptable and technically plausible. But then, people started messaging me saying that my posts didn’t show up in their feeds anymore, or they would go to share my account and couldn’t find it. And finally…it happened.
This past winter, my Instagram — not just a post but my whole account — was taken down, without warning, for violating Instagram’s Community Guidelines. My heart sank.
I had put so much time and effort into running this account and just like that… it was gone. I rushed to make a backup account (@swipesFORdaddy). I emailed Instagram to have my account reviewed while spamming my personal account to see if anyone knew someone who worked at Instagram. Fortunately, one of my followers at the Zuck conglomerate was able to report what Instagram internally calls an “oops” (aka when an account is wrongly removed). I suspect that these are favored for accounts with large followings, like my own. But since the original incident, my account has been removed three or four more times. Now, it’s gotten to the point where I’ve frankly lost track. And each time I approach my friend on the inside, like a dog with its tail between its legs, asking if she can bail me out again.
But in early 2021, things got even weirder. My Tinder account was deactivated.
Even with a new Apple ID and a new phone number, any Tinder account I tried to open would immediately be banned. In order to keep @swipes4daddy up, I had to resort to getting a burner phone. In just a year, I ran through three burner phones (thoughtfully given or sold to me by followers).
“In just a year, I ran through three burner phones.”
Each time one of my dating account profiles has been taken down, it was done so without explanation. By the time my second Tinder account was taken down, I had already become pretty cautious with what I was saying to the dads — never alluding to a sugar baby arrangement or any kind of payment including gifts (which gives you an automatic ban) and doing my best to not be inexplicably rude. Again and again, my account was suspiciously deleted.
So I moved on to other apps like Hinge, which was fine for a few weeks… until my account was abruptly removed… again. I couldn’t catch a break. Now, because Hinge’s terms prohibit users from using their app in a way that “May harm the reputation of Hinge or its affiliates,” so my guess is that someone at Hinge was made aware of my shedding a light on the creepy old men lurking on their app.
Then we flash forward, to my most recent censorship stint. I had been offline for a few days, going away for the weekend and taking a much needed break from talking to perverted old men. A day after my return, my Tinder account was completely banned. I hadn’t even SPOKEN to the dads in the past however many days, so there was nothing I could have said that could be flagged to the Tinder police. Upon investigation, I found this:
If you go to report someone on Tinder → Inappropriate messages → THIS PERSON ISN’T RESPONDING TO ME.
Some background: I swipe right on virtually every white middle-aged man on Tinder, and virtually all of them swipe right on me, so I have a lot of matches. It is physically impossible to keep conversations up with all of them. So yes, there’s a trove of dads just sitting there, endlessly. And it’s very clear — very, very clear — that the dads hate when I don’t respond within five minutes.
I finally realized that it’s because of this ridiculous rule that I’m getting banned from Tinder endlessly. Which made me question everything, how many minutes, hours, or days have to elapse in order for Tinder to take notice? Does Tinder remove you after one report? What if you’re sick? What if you lose your phone? And why does it seem like women are disproportionately punished for not being an automated answering machine?
This whole mess of not responding to every man’s beck and call begs the crucial question: what other banal things can get you banned from a dating app? Let’s take a look:
“Why does it seem like women are disproportionately punished for not being an automated answering machine?”
HINGE TERMS OF USE AGREEMENT
You are seeking a meaningful relationship.
How is meaningful qualified? What if I want a casual relationship, is that less “meaningful”? According to who, the OED or a mass of faceless Hinge moderators?
May harm the reputation of Hinge or its affiliates.
Like perhaps posting screenshots from your app?
TINDER COMMUNITY TERMS
Use the Service in order to damage Tinder
Ah, so again… posting screenshots of creeps on your app.
Funnily enough, this investigation into community guidelines revealed that “not responding to messages in a timely fashion” isn’t in Tinder’s community terms, but it is listed under “inappropriate messages.” Can someone define the word “inappropriate” real quick? Thanks.
BUMBLE COMMUNITY GUIDELINES
No Shirtless/underwear Mirror Selfies.
Fairly confident that this guideline equates to no shirtless WOMEN, because if a man is posed on the beach with no shirt, it’s totally fine.
No photos in bikinis/swimwear indoors
Confirmed: Olympic swimmers are banned from Hinge.
Finally, it dawned on me that maybe it’s not the men who are upholding archaic standards for women, but the dating apps themselves that encourage hyper-traditional dynamics. Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble are three of the most popular dating apps for straight people, and their puritanical community terms are seemingly only applied to female users.
If you read between the lines, these apps expect you to be covered up and seeking a serious relationship. Point blank. There’s no room for anything else according to the rigid dating app judiciary system. The tacit implication is that a young woman must be compliant in order to be successful in her search for a partner, however, we continue to be subjected to propositions for sex, men who happen to also be married, and commentary on our bodies.
“The tacit implication is that a young woman must be compliant in order to be successful in her search for a partner.”
Like everywhere else, the dating apps uphold a quintessential double-standard. While the dads may be taking advantage of the community guidelines, it is the community guidelines themselves that make it impossible for women to unapologetically claim space on the apps and pursue whatever kind of relationship they want.
Of course, I’m not on the apps for an authentic pursuit of love, rather the opposite. But shouldn’t that be allowed as well? Who’s to say there’s one way to interact with online users?
My presence on these apps is being continually censored and removed because it’s revealing an alarming and visceral truth about how dating apps operate: with puritanical, heteronormative, police-state-embracing rhetoric that encourages respectability politics for women and whatever-the-fuck-they-want for men. My presence helps uncover who these male users really are — and it’s them who should be reported. Not me.