BZ Blog

The white bar being current users, purple being former, and blue having never used Tinder

The highest Tinder penetration is among those in the broad ‘other category’, nearly a quarter of whom are Tinder users, increasing to nearly two-thirds if we also include former users

Without keeping specific track of the exact numbers I feel like probably four of the first 100 women were of any ethnicity other than Caucasian. It was striking enough to continue paying attention and I eventually went to the Internet trying to find out what the *K was going on.

What I found was a litany of issues that don’t seem to be getting talked about too much. Part of the problem in itself is that the articles that were written about this, have titles they will only attract the nerdier among us, and so, most of the population will never notice the headlines that would tell them about some of these insidious subtleties, and how they could be changing the arc of your life and society completely. I’ll break a couple of these down here:

• Artificial intelligence makes all the decisions
• Artificial intelligence is based on existing data
• The use of existing data reinforces current cultural norms and stereotypes
• This re-use of data reinforces the problems of the past on the people of today, and stifles social and financial mobility

In terms of ethnic background, Hispanic Americans are the more likely to be users (18%) or former users (40%) than black (11%/36%) or white Americans (11%/33%).

What this means, is that NO, it’s not because it’s all white women on the app. I even checked local stats, which I’m not sharing to preserve anonymity, but they didn’t explain things much better, though the population here skews a touch more Caucasian than the nation in general.