Tinder was doing oppo research on me and coming up with what? I wondered. That I had high cholesterol? The writer of the Evening Standard piece never called to ask me for a response to this smear, nor did any of the other news outlets that subsequently repeated it. It seemed clear to me that Rad was trying to get back at me for doing a piece that had raised questions about the cultural impact of his company, and so he was attacking me personally.
This was online culture, and it was the culture of tech, a notoriously sexist industry: A woman gets out of line? Slam her. In a single night, the Twitter account for Tinder went on a rampage, tweeting at me more than 30 times, accusing me of bad journalism.
But I had no obligation to interview the bosses of Tinder in a piece about the experience of users on dating apps. But I had interviewed more than 50 people for this piece, which is actually a lot for this type of lifestyle story, and I had talked to many experts as well. But while Tinder was already active in more than countries by then, North Korea was not one of them. And China has its own dating apps. What were they talking about? Their response was so over-the-top. People were tweeting humorous GIFs in response, like the one of Michael Jackson eating popcorn, indicating this was something juicy to watch.
I wanted to know—and I saw that it was mainly Russian bots. Many had profiles in the Cyrillic alphabet, with pictures of half-clothed women as avatars. It struck me as so strange. I mentioned it to a few people and they just looked at me like I was crazy, but it was real. It gave me a feeling of dread about what could happen to a journalist—or to anyone—now, on social media, where the weapons of attack were getting stealthier by the day.
In the media, there were suddenly several takes that misrepresented my reporting and the concerns I was trying to raise about how dating apps had changed the experience of dating, especially for women. My piece was about misogyny in online dating. But none of these backlash stories mentioned that. Meanwhile, my story was going viral. Through my website, I was getting emails from people all over the world—many were from London, one of the cities where Tinder is used the most.
