Mobile dating app Tinder fanned the flames of outrage surrounding Vanity Fair's apocalyptic "trend piece" on online dating Tuesday night, unleashing a string of tweets criticizing writer Nancy Jo Sales for supposedly biased reporting and incorrect facts. While the rant may have erred toward the self-important — Tinder did, after all, use the tweetstorm to claim that the app is "changing the world" and helping those living under isolated regimes in North Korea and China meet new people — it shouldn't be written off completely, says Jesse Singal at New York.
Sales' article relied heavily on vivid anecdotes to incite moral panic, Singal says, and she brushed aside some of the studies that didn't fit in line with her hypothesis that apps like Tinder are destroying ideas of traditional courtship and marriage and replacing them with meaningless, no-strings-attached flings.
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