How Tinder could take back the White House | Hacker News Reader

How Tinder could take back the White House

nytimes.com

37 pointsgreeneggs34 comments

I am definitely not pro-republican, but I think that crap like this really fuels the republican fire. It feels unethical. It feels like yet another attempt to jam politics down my throat at every turn.

"Congratulations you've got a match" - Just kidding no one wants to date you, they just want to sway you to their political agenda.

Honestly I think that part of the problem with politics, is that it's become so repulsive. Partially from b.s. tactics like this.

"Tinder is too casual a platform for users to feel hoodwinked by some political conversation. By and large, users surprised us with their receptiveness. Some people who received bot messages asked how they could join us."

It seems that the data contradicts your own personal view of this practice.

I don't really see what's repulsive or b.s. about it tbh. It's just automating the initiation of a dialogue. People are volunteering for it. There's nothing sinister as the intent is upfront and above board, and in terms of the content of your average Tinder conversation, politics is as fair game as any other topic surely?

I don't live in the US though, like many on here, so perhaps the perception would be different in the political climate over there.

In the past we simply called this spamming, and it was pretty much universally reviled.

I find it somewhat ironic/interesting given my past that the current industry is effectively focused on spamming society to sell stuff. I find the e-mail spammers of old to be far more ethical than what is happening today backed by billions of dollars.

Totally agree. It's a total bait-and-switch. People are not on Tinder to hear political propaganda and you're pushing it onto them surreptitiously.

This is like the online version of someone telling you you won a contest for a free night's stay in a nice hotel resort, but not disclosing until check in that you have to listen to a 4-hour timeshare presentation.

Actually, it's probably worse. In this case, often there isn't a real meet up possibility at all, as according to the article "the bot convinced Tinder that their profiles were in geographical locations where the vote was close," and often the "matches" were hundreds of miles away.

At least the timeshare salesperson does, in fact, give you the hotel resort stay for your trouble.

This isn't spamming though, by any definition.

Spamming is unsolicited contact. All contact on Tinder is solicited (and a good deal of the non-automated content is a lot more "scummy" than this).

I'm finding the sentiment on HN in response to this bizarre but I guess your reference to "industry" (and billions of dollars) may be a hint. US political campaigns are quite a different beast to elsewhere, and yes, a lot more comparable to campaigns of massive multinational corporations.

Huh? It's spamming by every definition.

When I swipe right on Tinder, it's not to get a political message. It's to (presumably) get laid. Bots that send me a political or commercial message on a service that specifically denies such contact is the definition spamming.

It's the same thing as giving your e-mail address to play a cool new game, the game not existing, and now you're being spammed to death. Or messaging that interesting/hot girl from the AIM chatroom, only to find it's a bot advertising a commercial site.

I'd say this is exactly the same line of thought, something I know for a fact since in a past life I've worked for folks who "marketed" in such a manner. The thought patterns are absolutely identical, and I'd be surprised if this political company didn't actually hire a SEO/chat spam company to implement such a feature.

All you have to do is s/politics/penny stocks/ and this turns into an entirely different story. The content of the message doesn't matter, it's still abusing a service to send an unwanted political or commercial message.

Edit: Typos

Swiping right on Tinder gets you contact with that person. Nothing more. No guarantee of content topic (or sex). You're swiping to talk to someone.

Nothing in life is "guaranteed". However, we often manage to form reasonable expectations about how things work. And when such reasonable expectations are broken, there are ramifications.

In this case, I would guess that unexpected political spam devalues Tinder and makes people less likely to use it. Imagine if large numbers of organizations started using Tinder to spread a message or support their cause. It would make finding a date on the app significantly more frustrating.

> You're swiping to talk to someone.

The key word in your sentence above is 'someone'. Not a goddamn bot whose raison d'être is to spam you with an unsolicited political message.

How anyone can look at this and not see it as anything other than spam is beyond me.

The bot convinced users that they were swiping on someone that was local, but that person was often hundreds of miles away. I don't know how you think this isn't spam. They may have solicited contact by swiping, however, they did so thinking that they could potentially meet the person, because they believe that person is local. The political propaganda they're getting back from a bot that is made to appear like a local potential romantic partner that they thought they swiped on, is unsolicited given the nature of the Tinder platform.

Agreed, this is a super scummy practice that is most likely against the terms of service.

>...crap like this really fuels the republican fire. It feels unethical. It feels like yet another attempt to jam politics down my throat at every turn.

Understatement of the year. The fact that the Clinton campaign thought that it would be a good idea to create an online astroturfing group, and then tell the world about it like it was a brilliant idea, is what made me vote third party.

The fact that you didn't know that the Clinton campaign did no such thing contributed to our current situation.

And the fact that GP still doesn't know to this day suggests our future is bleak. Democracy relies on an educated electorate.

With that out of the way, using spam to educate the electorate as in this Tinder example or as in GP's imagined Clinton campaign rubs me the wrong way.

Sure, it was a PAC, but to deny that it existed and the two had close ties is a gross misrepresentation of the truth. The amount of gaslighting by the old guard in the DNC to justify why they supposedly lost unfairly does not bode well for the next election. You need people to actually like you in order to win elections. You can't do that by selling out to big business, and then trying to smooth things over with billions in ads and outright sockpuppetry.

Here, read up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record

Why don't you read your own link? Nowhere is there any evidence that they were astroturfing. All of their social media accounts were clearly marked as paid for by the PAC, just like the social media accounts of any other PAC, as required by FEC rules.

Scummy but most probably legal since its a form of speech. One could restrict this with the ToS and enforcing it.

I'd be very surprised if the users who "lent" their profiles to allow the group to make political spambots aren't violating Tinder's TOS.

Regardless of your political leanings, this whole operation feels pretty scummy to me.

The overwhelmingly negative response from the primarily US-based HN audience to this, in stark contrast to the very positive responses from actual recipients of contact in this initiative (and the subsequent extremely positive and progressive election turnout statistics) are surely symptomatic of some significant fundamental differences in the perception of politics in both countries.

I appear to be literally the only person in this thread who thinks this is OK. As someone who's largely opposed to advertising full stop, in any form, this doesn't seem the same to me in any way. Nor can I see any reason to find it objectionable.

What exactly is it about this that makes people uncomfortable?

Well, it would be much better if the article wasn't written by those who organized the efforts. They are likley to be heavily biased towards interpreting the outcome positively, especially in a public write up. They could have somewhat alleviated this concern with hard data, but unfortunately they did not do so.

For me, it's pretty simple. I don't like it for the same reason that I don't like door-to-door solicitors or activists.

This is a fair point. I would like to see hard data.

While I'm based in Ireland, I do know a good deal of people in the UK who voted and campaigned (and one who ran for LibDems), and we are also quite close and clued in to UK politics here in general. To me, their account seems plausible based on my own anecdotal knowledge of how campaigning during the election went.

The youth vote turnout was unprecedented, and there was a lot of people involved in various "weird", innovative grass-roots voluntary political campaigns for Corbyn.

In that sense, it felt very Sanders-esque, so the reference to Clinton in the article is bizarre. Particularly given the almost universal, blatant anti-Corbyn media bias. This may also be another reason it seems OK - Clinton/other political campaigns have big media behind them (and large financial interests), so I don't think it would work for them. People wouldn't be as willing to volunteer their time for such an industry-backed cause. Corbyn, like Sanders was very much demonized by the media (tbh, probably worse than for Sanders), so this may seem more like fighting back to people involved (both the senders and receivers of the messages).

Point taken on the door-to-door solicitors or activists, but that depends on the cause really too I think. Certainly most people despise commercial door-to-door calls, but I personally do door-to-door political canvassing here in Ireland, which is the norm here and in the UK, and the vast majority of feedback is positive. Nobody minds when its politics.

I encourage them to try this. It will deliver amazing results - To republicans. It will virtually assure not just Trump 2020, but Schwarzenegger 2024; It will be a coup of epic proportions for the GOP.

Who are they targeting with this system? Angry young men. What have they identified as Angry Young Men's problem? Women won't have sex with them. What do they propose? Offer sex, then never deliver. If a chatbot delivers ridiculous political pandering, and gets in the way of the actual end goal (Sex) by delivering chaff and false-leads, where will the anger be concentrated? Certainly, fundamental attribution error will slough plenty of it off on women, further radicalizing them. But mostly, and correctly, their ire will fall towards the PACs who've set out to 'convince' them; By playing a game wrong and showing that they're untrustworthy, they'll become more jaded and resistant to whatever ideas they're proposing.

It's the evolutionarily correct response - Don't co-operate with those that are trying to trick you. The continued rise of cognitive science as a persuasion tactic, "gamification", and other means of non-subtle manipulation are significantly responsible for the national divide - It's not unreasonable to fight aggressively against those you believe are manipulating you. It's just that there are two camps to the manipulation, and it's much easier to see the manipulation in the other camp.

I think HN has been majorly mis-reading this -- it sounds like the article describes a Tinder-mediated get out the vote campaign. It attempts to reach youth (vastly more likely to be progressives, statistically) and convince them to vote by using a marketing strategy that works very well on youth in other media, that is, convince them attractive eligible potential partners care about (whatever is being sold: voting, owning a particular car brand, using a particular kind of perfume or cosmetic). It does not specifically target conservatives and again, especially in the UK, a minority of people 18-25 vote conservative. But for what it's worth, I believe the electoral system in the US will make this less effective there. Telling all the young millenials in college towns to go vote by quirky social media means is unlikely to have an effect on the older rural population (The campaign only targets 18-25 and a lot of people in rural areas don't use Tinder), and a lot of states can't be won only through college towns.

I suppose they think they are helping, like Hollywood actors spending an awards show spouting off. Really, they just feed into the "us vs them" mentality and help the politician they hate get a few more votes.

In this case, there's a lot to indicate that this initiative did in fact help.

I'm a bit unconvinced given all the other polling and election predictions that has failed in the last couple of years.

I was referring to results, not predictions. This election is in the past...

There are no girls on the internet.

> With the help of two software engineers, Erika Pheby and Kyle Buttner,

There is at least one.

At least one who self-identifies with a feminine name. Did you just assume her gender? Or perhaps you know that Kyle is female-identifying.

I had actually thought Kyle was a girls' name due to only knowing a female Kyle (spelled Kyle, pronounced Kylie).

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