Tinder's Twitter Account Freaked Out On Vanity Fair Last Night

Tinder is so successful that it's become a shorthand for dating apps -- technological marvels that, depending on your perspective (or relationship status) are either the best thing to ever happen to human connection, or the devil. Vanity Fair's Nancy Jo Sales appears to think the latter, laying out a case for the app as the precursor of a "dating apocalypse."

Tinder did not take too kindly to that suggestion, or to the amount of play the story is getting (because alarmist writing about "hookup culture," no matter how many times it gets shut down, is always a good way to get people to pay attention to you). Last night, the company's corporate account went on a bit of a... um... bender, starting with some rather public protestation that Sales didn't call.

Next time reach out to us first @nancyjosales... that's what journalists typically do.

-- Tinder (@Tinder) August 11, 2015

Some of these tweets are sad "suggestions" for the story that are essentially claiming that Tinder's public profile isn't representative of who it really is on the inside, you know?

You could have talked about how everyone on Tinder is authenticated through Facebook. And how we show users the friends they have in common.

-- Tinder (@Tinder) August 11, 2015

Some of them are kind of childish and indicative of a super-inflated sense of importance for a company that has found a more effective way for people to get laid.

We love ALL of these #SwipedRight stories. Tinder is simply how people meet.

-- Tinder (@Tinder) August 11, 2015

The saddest thing about Tinder's meltdown is that they actually have a point, in some respects -- Sales' story is a clear example of confirmation bias, cherrypicking individual stories to try to uphold the narrative she already wanted to convey.
 

It's disappointing that @VanityFair thought that the tiny number of people you found for your article represent our entire global userbase 😏

-- Tinder (@Tinder) August 11, 2015

In addition to functioning as a prime example of how to use emoji in snarky comments, this tweet is, in essence, correct. The actual data surrounding Tinder and dating does not supporting anything nearly as distressing as the picture Sales tries to paint -- even if it doesn't actually have, say, North Korean users, Tinder is still not the end of the world as we know it. So why did this whole fight start? I guess it's just hard to make your profile stand out these days.