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Life & More
LifestyleBig ReadsTravelLiving WellInterviewsExperience





I WAS RACIALLY PROFILED BY A DATING APP – AND I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE

Big Read


RADHIKA SANGHANI WANTS DATING APPS TO OFFER THE OPTION TO ‘OPT OUT’ OF
ALGORITHM-BASED SUGGESTIONS SO SHE CAN SEE NON-CURATED PROFILES THAT MORE
ACCURATELY REFLECT THE WORLD AROUND HER

Radhika Sanghani found herself confused by what Hinge was showing her on the app
(Photo: Supplied)
By Radhika Sanghani
August 30, 2023 6:00 am(Updated August 31, 2023 1:38 pm)


When I checked my new Hinge profile and saw I had 20 likes, I instantly swiped
through them, excited for any potential matches. That’s when I realised that 19
of the men who had liked me were South Asian like me. Only one of the men was
white.

Now I am happy to date a man of any ethnicity – I’ve ticked “open to all” on my
profile – but only being liked by South Asian men made me feel uncomfortable. It
didn’t feel representative of the male demographic where I live in London, and
it made me ask the question: did only men of my race find me attractive? Or was
this something to do with Hinge’s algorithm?

Even though my ethnicity wasn’t visible to other daters on my profile, when
signing up to Hinge I had given the information that I was South Asian. So, as
an experiment, I decided to change my registered ethnicity to White/Caucasian,
again choosing to not have it visible on my profile. The next time I checked, I
had another 20 likes. This time, they were more aligned with what I expected as
a Londoner – a mix of men from all different backgrounds.





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I felt a sense of relief as I realised that people of all ethnicities clearly
can find me attractive – until I remembered that to get these results, I’d had
to lie to the app about my own race. For whatever reason, when the algorithm
knew I was South Asian I only received likes from South Asians, but when I told
it I was white, I had a completely different experience. But why?

“It’s really problematic,” says Orly Lobel, author of The Equality Machine:
Harnessing Tomorrow’s Technologies for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future. “We
can’t really know which of the two possibilities it is – has the app learned in
general that South Asian men only want to date South Asian women? Or has it made
these assumptions matching ethnicity to ethnicity and finding those patterns
generally?”


ALGORITHMS

Hinge declined to comment specifically on my case, instead saying that the only
goal behind its algorithm is to help daters have good dates by introducing them
to people who meet their preferences, and whose preferences they meet. But Lobel
believes that the algorithms that these dating apps use can promote racial bias,
no matter what their intentions may be.

“It is the reality of the design of the majority of dating apps today that they
are considering ethnicity,” she says. Lobel adds that on some apps, if people
say they’re open to dating any races, the apps will specifically show them
people of the race that the algorithm believes is the “least desirable”, so that
those potentially-overlooked users can have a higher chance of getting matches.
She references an incident in 2013, when reporter Amanda Chicago Lewis told app
Coffee Meets Bagel she was willing to date men of any race, and then was only
shown profiles of Asian men.



Some apps specifically allow people to search for potential matches based on
ethnicity. Grindr removed its ethnicity filter after the murder of George Floyd
in 2020, but Hinge still has one, claiming it is there to “support people of
colour looking to find a partner with shared cultural experiences and
background”.

“I think they should absolutely remove it, that’s not how it’s being used,” says
Anita Bhagwandas, author of Ugly: Giving Us Back Our Beauty Standards. “If
you’re looking for somebody from a certain culture or religion, you’d use a
specific app for that like J-date or Shaadi. All the ethnicity filter on Hinge
does is allow people of colour to be fetishised or filtered out, and anecdotally
Hinge has been the least successful for myself and many friends of colour.”

Radhika decided to change her registered ethnicity to white/caucasian to see
what happened (Photo: Supplied)

Bhagwandas has found that all her non-white friends believe they are “placed at
a disadvantage in the algorithm hierarchy”. Hadi (who declined to give his
surname), 33, is a British Pakistani doctor living in Bristol who spent most of
his twenties on dating apps and feels the same way. “One thing I realised very
quickly was if I put ‘South Asian’ into my profile, I wouldn’t get anybody
contacting me,” he says. “I don’t know if that’s necessarily because of [any
individual] app or also just biases and racism in society. But when I didn’t put
that into my profile, I was getting a lot more contacts matching with me and
messaging me.”

At times he thought it was all in his head, until he went on a first date with a
white man who instantly ended the date because he’d assumed Hadi was Spanish,
not brown. It all led to Hadi feeling so insecure that when he matched with his
now-husband on Grindr, one of the first things he said to him was: “My parents
are Pakistani. Is that okay?”

Looking back, Hadi sees this behaviour as a sign of how much the apps affected
him. “I’d been so far deep into this app-sphere where the algorithms were
becoming part of the way I was thinking. It had such an impact on my self-esteem
that I asked permission for me to be who I am.”

One of the biggest problems for Hadi (and for me) was not knowing exactly what
the algorithms were doing – and whether they were causing the racial bias, or
just exacerbating a bias that is already there (something that we can only know
if the apps decide to operate with transparency).

“You need a lot of visibility into what’s happening which these apps aren’t
willing to provide,” says games developer Ben Berman, who also points out that
often, the engineers at the apps don’t even know the reasoning behind the
algorithm’s decisions, because the algorithms are processing so much data that
they’ve become incredibly sophisticated.



He also thinks that apps are reluctant to “talk about the math deeply” because
then they’d have to reveal that for every one woman on many apps there are 10
men – and that it means the algorithms on heterosexual dating apps are really
only used for women. “Men can swipe through profiles in 15 minutes and exhaust
the total supply, so what’s the point of sorting for them?” he says.


> ONLINE DATING: VITAL STATISTICS
> 
>  * Research reveals that one in three people in the UK have experienced racial
>    discrimination, fetishisation or microaggressions when dating online.
>  * Groups who were most likely to experience fetishisation were men and women
>    from mixed heritage backgrounds. 
>  * 50 per cent of women from mixed heritage backgrounds said they had
>    experienced fetishisation, according to the same survey.
>  * The market size, measured by revenue, of the dating services industry was
>    £373.6m in 2022.
>  * According to a study by Statista, by the end of 2023, there will be an
>    estimated 441 million active users of online dating providers (including
>    apps and platforms) worldwide. 
> 
> (Sources: Bumble 2021 survey; IBISWorld;  Statista) 


‘COLLABORATIVE FILTERING’

Even though the apps are notoriously guarded about their algorithms, Berman, who
once created a video game, Monster Match, to illustrate exactly how the apps
work and expose the racial bias at play, believes that the big apps like those
owned by the Match group, including Hinge, Tinder and Bumble, use “collaborative
filtering”, where the apps recommend profiles for people based on majority
opinions, while smaller apps generally won’t use algorithms.

“The way collaborative filtering works is if you swipe right on a guy, the app
will see who else swiped right on him a lot, and then it will show you the
profiles of who those people liked that you haven’t seen yet,” Berman explains.
“It’s a forecast based on other people’s behaviour, to help save you time.”

The problem is these algorithms – which are all designed to increase user
engagement on the apps – lead to people constantly being shown small pools of
people from similar socioeconomic backgrounds and races. They also prioritise
matches based on attractiveness, which is largely based on Eurocentric beauty
standards, and can send matches that predict what users will like, which might
include a similarity of appearance.


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“Apps can learn from our past biases that stereotypical Barbie attractiveness is
beauty, and decide this blonde woman is probably going to be more desirable to
what it determines as the most desirable men in the pool, and the others are
left with a smaller pool of who they’re being shown,” says Lobel.

It’s why Berman says “the algorithms are making things worse”. He references a
blog post written by OKCupid co-founder Christian Rudder in 2014 that showed
racism had been present on the site since 2009, with black women and Asian men
least likely to receive messages on apps, while white men and white women were
unwilling to date outside their race. “It’s weird their data showed that,
because all the bigger trends in the world showed people were considering race
and ethnicity a lot less in dating,” adds Berman.

Indeed, interracial marriages among black Americans jumped from 5 per cent in
1980 to 18 per cent in 2015. But Berman believes that algorithms often retain
the bias they started out with, using historical data and getting stuck in a
“feedback loop” where they persist in their beliefs about preferences, even if
those have actually changed over the years.



Billie Gianfrancesco, 33, a PR consultant in London has been on dating apps on
and off for around a decade and believes she could be stuck in a “feedback loop”
from the algorithms. She is of mixed heritage, so has ticked both “white” and
“black” when setting up her profile on dating apps, but says she has had huge
amounts of racism from white men.

Billie Gianfrancesco also had a bad experience on dating apps (Photo: Supplied)

“I’d get comments like ‘I’ve never f****d a black woman before’, ‘I want to suck
on those big lips’ or ‘I hope you have a black booty’. It was overtly sexual and
for me, Hinge – the app I was using – is for dating. I felt so uncomfortable. It
was obvious a lot of white men were matching with me for sex rather than
relationships – or during Black Lives Matter, some of them were matching with me
just to have arguments about racial politics.”

Gianfrancesco suspected these men were finding her through the ethnicity filter.
“I find that hugely problematic, because I know they were doing it to fetishise
me.” Now, she’s decided to use the filter herself to exclude white men, though
she is open to dating men of any other race. “For me, it’s about protecting
myself and avoiding racism. I used to get mainly white matches, but now 98 per
cent of them are black and I feel safer.”


TRANSPARENCY

It is a depressing reality when people of colour using dating apps are having to
exclude a whole race to avoid racism as Gianfrancesco did, lie about their own
ethnicity to get a representative selection of matches as I did, or like Hadi,
ask for permission to be the race that they are. While some of these issues are
very much societal ones, it’s clear that the algorithms are probably making
things worse.

It’s why Lobel is calling for more transparency from the companies behind the
apps, but also more choice. “I think we can be creative, getting more
information about people’s preferences and inventing more categories that have
nothing to do with our social ethnicities, but instead are about personalities.
That forward thinking can blind the algorithm to race and socioeconomic
identity, instead creating new identities online.”


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Personally, I would love for dating apps to provide an option to opt out of
algorithms and instead see randomised profiles, rather than what they think we
want. “I’d love that,” agrees Gianfrancesco. “You change, your tastes and
circumstances do, but if the algorithms don’t, you’re stuck.” This conversation
has inspired her to delete her profile and create a new one, so she is at least
able to create new algorithms.

Lobel offers a more hopeful view for the future, believing that if dating apps
were to move in the direction of transparency and choice, they could actually
reduce racial bias rather than increasing it. Evidence seems to suggest the
advent of apps is one of the drivers of an increase in interracial marriages,
perhaps by giving people greater access to matches beyond their usual friendship
groups. “The marriage market has become bigger in its pool. Apps are an
opportunity for more diversity, and to expand our pool,” Lobel says.



It is indisputable that racial bias exists in our offline world, but that
doesn’t mean the online world needs to be the exact same. “We might as well
think about the opportunities and comparative advantage of the digital world,”
says Lobel, and I can’t help but agree. There is so much the apps could do to
move away from racial bias, or at the very least, allow users to opt out of
algorithms so they don’t make things worse.




TOPICS

 * Algorithms
 * Dating Apps
 * Features
 * Online Dating
 * Racism
 * Relationships


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