Vanity Fair Throws Major Shade at Tinder; Passive-Aggressive Twitter Meltdown Ensues
August 12, 2015
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Tinder recently lashed out at Vanity Fair and one of their journalists for publishing an article that links their company to the “dating apocalypse”.
Late last night, Nancy Jo Sales, who has been a journalist and editor at Vanity Fair since 2000, received upwards of 30 critical tweets from Tinder’s official Twitter account concerning her exposé titled “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse’” published on August 6.
Sales argued in her article that Tinder and other online dating websites are destroying the value of courtship and are instead focusing their attention on getting users to hook up.
Sales separately tweeted a statistic from a recent GlobalWebIndex report that claims 30% of Tinder users are currently married. Tinder denied the legitimacy of the statistic, calling it “preposterous,” and said that according to their numbers, married users only account for 1.7% of their total user base.
“Thirty percent of all Tinder users—who are supposed to be single—are married, per a new report from GlobalWebIndex” http://t.co/d6n0YPzIYC
— Nancy Jo Sales (@nancyjosales) August 11, 2015
Tinder was clearly furious at Vanity Fair and Sales for slamming their company and decided to openly message Sales via Twitter. Tinder stated that Sales did not have her facts straight and that her article was an example of one-sided journalism. Some of Tinder’s other tweets:
Next time reach out to us first @nancyjosales… that’s what journalists typically do.
— Tinder (@Tinder) August 11, 2015
Among Tinder’s assertions on Twitter were that the app has users in authoritarian North Korea, a country which has only a little over 1,000 IP addresses for its 25 million oppressed citizens.
A simple fact check conducted by Gawker today using the app’s Passport feature found that the company’s claim was likely untrue. Sales, on the other hand, replied to the company’s claim with a question:
So while Tinder compiled a sizeable mound of consecutive tweets thinking they were defending their position against the Vanity Fair piece, the end result was embarrassing publicity.
A Tinder spokesperson walked back the company’s tweets this morning:
“We have a passionate team that truly believes in Tinder. While reading the recent Vanity Fair article about today’s dating culture, we were saddened to see that the article didn’t touch upon the positive experiences that the majority of our users encounter daily. Our intention was to highlight the many statistics and amazing stories that are sometimes left unpublished, and, in doing so, we overreacted.”
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