Tinder wants billboard in LA removed that links dating apps to STDs

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation ad that Tinder finds offensive.

(Image credit: Twitter.com/AIDSHealthcare)

published 29 September 2015

Tinder is not happy with a billboard that went up in Los Angeles last week that equates using location-based dating apps with a growing rate of STDs, and has sent a cease and desist letter to the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, asking that they take it down.

The billboard directs people to FreeSTDCheck.org, and features silhouettes of people with the words "Tinder," "Chlamydia," "Grindr," and "Gonorrhea." In a letter to the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Tinder's attorney said the billboard is making "unprovoked and wholly unsubstantiated accusations" in order to "irreparably damage Tinder's reputation in an attempt to encourage others to take an HIV test by your organization." Grindr, a location-based dating app for gay men, was also caught off guard by the billboard, and says its app runs PSAs about the importance of STD testing, the Los Angeles Times reports.

The foundation responded to Tinder by saying they would not remove the billboard, and cited a Vanity Fair article that says casual encounters are on the rise due to dating apps like Tinder, and a report from the Rhode Island Department of Health that said STD rates increased from 2013 to 2014 in the state and "high-risk behaviors include social media to arrange casual and often anonymous sexual encounters." In a statement, the foundation's public health division director, Whitney Engeran-Cordova, said that in many ways "location-based mobile dating apps are becoming a digital bathhouse for millennials wherein the next sexual encounter can literally just be a few feet away — as well as the next STD."

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.