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Domestic Violence Prevention Campaign Uses Fake Tinder Profiles To Raise Awareness

CREDIT: TINDER
CREDIT: TINDER

A Florida domestic violence center rolled out a new domestic violence ad campaign on an unlikely platform: Tinder.

Women in Distress, along with ad agency Bravo/Y&R;, created fake profiles for three male abusers. Their photos start out all smiley and safe; as you scroll to the right, they get progressively more violent. Bravo/Y&R; swiped right on every single woman they saw for the first four weeks of the campaign. Women who matched with the ad-man would subsequently be prompted to look at the man’s photos. The idea was to reach local women — those in abusive relationships or close to someone who is — and be inspired to have a conversation about domestic violence.

The PSA campaign has gotten mostly positive buzz: Cosmo deemed it “pretty amazing” and AdWeek, while allowing for the fact that “there are certainly a few problems with the execution,” called the effort “well intentioned.”

The impulse to be supportive of any effort to raise awareness about domestic violence is understandable. It is hard to understand, hard to discuss, hard to escape, hard to explain. And it is rampant: three women in the United States are murdered by a partner every single day. And young women, between the ages of 16 and 24, experience the highest rates of intimate partner violence; it’s nearly three times the national average.

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But there is something very unsettling about this particular tactic. It is yet another advertisement invading a space where advertisements do not belong.

At SXSW, the powers that be behind Ex Machina, a sci-fi movie opening in Austin the same weekend as the festival, pulled a similar stunt. Using photos of an actress, Alicia Vikander, who plays a robot in the film, the promotional team set up a fake Tinder profile for a 25-year-old woman named “Ava” who would engage in a text message conversation with her male matches before sending along a link to her Instagram, which had only two posts, both of which were promotional materials for Ex Machina.

Tinder is for humans who want to meet other humans. In any other context — on this website, for instance — advertisements are required to be clearly labeled as such. Why, then, on Tinder, is it kosher for an advertisement, even one for a worthy cause, to masquerade as something else?

There are better ways, through Tinder if you must, to raise awareness about domestic violence. Ways that do not involve convoluted, misleading profiles. You could just upload a screenshot of text that says something like “If you or someone you know is in an abusive relationship, get help” with the phone number and website below, and use that as a profile picture. You’d still accomplish the aim of reaching women in a way that is private (and, therefore, hidden from a partner who could retaliate if he knew his girlfriend or wife was seeking out this information) without screwing around with women’s expectations and emotions.

Catfishing Tinder users in order to sell a product is creepy and invasive, even when the product is something objectively good, like domestic violence awareness. Pretending to be one thing (a match) while really being something else (an advertisement) is a violation of the social contract of these apps. No one wants you to Trojan horse your #brand in a potential partner.

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People are vulnerable enough on Tinder. It’s a dating app where you are judged primarily by your appearance. Can we not create yet another reason for women to be concerned about who, exactly, they are communicating with when they starting texting a guy they’ve never met?

Our virtual space still belongs to us. Our technological presence is still a stand-in for a flesh-and-blood person. Surely you would be horrified if someone met you, in real life, completely lied about their identity, and only after engaging you in a conversation for a while, revealed they weren’t a person at all but were a remarkably lifelike hologram here to sell you Pepsi or whatever.

It is especially discomfiting in the case of Women in Distress, considering the fact that it relies on the very tactics the PSA purports to deplore: a man introducing himself to a woman as one thing but proving, over time, to be something else entirely.