Photo by Nik

Western societies find themselves assailed by “loneliness epidemics” like the one declared by the previous US surgeon general, who linked the plague of social isolation in the US to a smorgasbord of physical illnesses. Sexual inactivity is one crucial feature of isolation and of depression—the lifestyle traits that have most defined the global culture of Gen Z: the Institute for Family Studies revealed that last year “24% of people aged 18-29 said they had not had sex in the past year, twice as many as in 2010”, declaring a historic “sex recession” which also drives high suicide and drug addiction rates. That sex-recession is behind the problems of plummeting fertility rates and demographic decline in Western countries—phenomena that demonstrably feed political extremism in the 21st century, as propagandists for the Great Replacement Theory draw conspiratorial links between lowering birth rates and migration, claiming that these changes are all part of a diabolically engineered plan—rather than, say, the pain and debris resulting from the indifference of business-run societies.

(This essay was pre-announced and debated on the “This is Revolution” Podcast, audio link here https://bitterlake.podbean.com/e/love-on-the-left-ep-4-confronting-big-techs-monopoly-on-love-ft-arturo-desimone/ video here )

Technology—in particular the smartphone and the apps we download onto it via GooglePlay—plays a pivotal role in this wave of asceticism. The management of contemporary sexual frustration towards profit results in the techno-puritanical wasteland we currently dwell in. One year before the pandemic, a team of American Ivy League scientists published their findings in a much-underlooked research article “Smartphones Reduce Smiles Between Strangers”, (Elsevier 2019). Think of casual flirting that used to happen more often in public spaces, (on the subway, in parks and in cafés, which are today lit up by the arcade of smartphones intercutting all glances.). As suggested by the cultural theorist Nina Power, younger people drink less than ever, partly because alcohol rarely mixes well with anti-depressants, but also because of the fear of “going viral”: the dread of the phone-camera’s power to livestream one’s most embarrassing drunken behavior to a mass audience. And in Western contexts, less drinking means less promiscuity.

Outlets like The Atlantic, WSJ, and Unherd have attributed the “sex recession” to host of culprits including post-MeToo culture having made “consent” into an increasingly nebulous concept; the pandemic; and even mass consumption of therapy. Yet very few have checked the role of dating apps. Usually, it is falsely assumed that dating apps yield the opposite effect, making real-world hook-ups all too facile. Newer testimonies do not bear out that supposition: the golden age of dating apps is over (as the New York Times revealed in a 2024 essay “It’s Not You: Dating Apps Are Getting Worse ) But what ended it? As we face the loneliness pandemic and the ascent of incels into political careers, the problem of what seems to be a cartel-organized mass-dysfunction of the dating apps can no longer be a trivial concern.

Why was a single firm—the multibillion-dollar oligopoly called Match Group Inc, or MTCH on the New York stock exchange— allowed to aggressively buy up 25 rival dating apps in a decade, flagrantly undermining the anti-trust laws meant to protect civil liberties and consumers?

Match Group now operates over 45 distinct websites and romance search-engines, including the giants Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, and the League, next to having legally usurped services that you may have never heard of: India Match, Republican People Meet, Black People Meet, Asian People Meet, Black Seniors, Little People Meet, Divorced People Meet, Marriage Minded. Match leaves no niche or minority group untouched: from Latinos to vegetarians, to Muslims, Jews, and Catholics who wish to date the likeminded. In effect, “MTCH” inhabits the bedrooms of approximately 345 million people worldwide, mostly in the postindustrial societies–China’s “Great Firewall” blocks Tinder.

Many couples in the early 2010s met thanks to these apps. But nowadays, surveys show soaring disaffection, with devices “no longer working” as before. That disenchantment culminated in a class action lawsuit initiated in a California court in February last year by a law-firm representing a group of mostly male plaintiffs. Their resonant statement (bold emphasis added by me) opens:

“Over the past decade, MatchGroup’s application-based dating platforms (…) have altered social reality. A millennium of traditional courtship has been replaced by technology. Striking up an in-person conversation with a stranger cannot compete with the convenience of swiping left or right on a profile, and no person could engage with a hundred potential partners in person in a matter of minutes.

Convenience, however, comes at a price. Harnessing powerful technologies and hidden algorithms, Match intentionally designs the Platforms with addictive, game-like design features, which lock users into a perpetual pay-to-play loopthat prioritizes corporate profits over its marketing promises and customers’ (…) The undisclosed defective design is intended to erode users’ ability to disengage from the Platforms and turn users into addicts who will purchase ever-more expensive subscriptions to unlock unlimited and other ‘special’ features which are not designed to deliver on Match’s marketing promises, but instead to further addict and forever entrench users in the app.”

The idealistic group of disenchanted Americans was thwarted last December. Indulging the wishes of monopolists, the judge shot down the lawsuit, deciding that settlement must be worked out in private arbitrations by each individual plaintiff. Attorney Ryan Clarkson said “our clients continue to evaluate all options to hold Match accountable for a business model that puts profits over people with psychological manipulation at its core”. Sounds hopeful. But it seems MTCH has won thus far in a neoliberal America which refuses to enact existing anti-trust laws.The lawsuit hinged its case on how the addictive nature of dating apps turns their usage into a form of pathological online gambling, or ludopathy, in the big casino of desire. Unfortunately, the litigating party failed to strengthen their accusations of “purposefully addictive design” because they overlooked even more disturbing facts about MTCH. Namely, the way in which the dating app economy intersects with criminal ecosystems around the world. By not looking beyond what happens in the US, complainants failed to seize abundant evidence that would have strengthened their case. Hopefully, the following stories of Match-related crime beyond the US’ shores can revive the legal battle with a new punch.

Cyberpimping: MTCH Group’s Refusal to take action against worldwide known prostitution-fronts on their dating apps

Dating-apps have long been commonplace tools for the influencer industry. Ambitious influencers who seek to monetize their Instagram accounts will farm and fish for followers on Tinder: countless profiles of attractive people state “I’m rarely on here, find me on IG @username”. Influencer-world has, at many turns, become a gateway for models into high-end prostitution, as revealed in fashion magazines like Evie in the anonymous-credited article “Instagram Prostitution: The Secret of Jetsetting Influencers”. Sponsorships and monetization on Instagram might be enough to survive and scrape by, but cannot suffice to prop up the lobster-cracking lives exhibited by instagrammers who live in Manhattan and London.

The parasitic misuse of Tinder and its siblings by the influencer industry was well-documented ever since GQ magazine’s bombshell report, revealing how some mostly female content-creators have gamed the dating apps to harvest profitable fanbases on Meta’s platforms and on Tiktok. These exposés had close to zero effect on the matchmaking monopoly’s willingness to clean house. Why should a monopolist worry about publicity, given the absence of competitors to nab fleeing customers? Match owns the only game in town.

A far less explored problem is how Tinder has also enabled a boom in the conventional, less glamorous kinds of prostitution. In an era when social media substitutes the physical town square and its vendors and soapboxes, streetwalkers also perambulate online. “Match” does nothing to curtail the army of profiles selling sex for smaller sums of money daily, so don’t expect MTCH to tackle the high-end escort activities of attractive “content creators” herding their hopeless matches into their Instagram or TikTok fanbases for profit.

In Israel, shortly after the Knesset banned prostitution, the sex-trade moved to the internet: Tinder is now the major platform for Israeli men seeking prostitutes. Tinder fulfills a similar role in Gulf countries, displacing the more colorful harems and hammams of lore.

Tinder’s mutation from dating-app into cyberpimp has become especially dangerous in Latin America. Last year, the US Embassy in Colombia deplored a spate of “suspicious” deaths that all happened over the span of just two months, with eight American men killed in Medellin by women they met on Tinder—these people have a practice of drugging their dates with scopolamine, a plant-derived chemical popularly known as burundanga or “devil’s breath.” This compound nullifies the willpower of the poisoned person and causes amnesia. A string of kidnappings have also impacted the Mexican tourist-destination of Jalisco, where tourists were ensnared by sequesterers through Tinder. Argentine press reported on what it sensationally calls “black widows” (viudas negras) or escorts who rob and assault elderly men lured through dating-apps.

Unfortunately, the Californian class action lawsuit, basing its case on the “engineered to be addictive” quality of Match-owned apps, made no mention of the massive number of enticing profiles that serve as fronts for the sex-tourism industry, and which make matchmaking dangerous, rather than merely frustrating. Nobody seems to be taking Match Group to task over its negligence when it comes to taking visible “game-changing” measures to stop underworld niches from hijacking its platforms.

The Cover-Up

Sex-workers tend to be very attractive people who keep viewers on-app in a hypnotic stupor. Perhaps the company’s hesitancy to crack down on legions of deceitful and dangerous profiles, is because these apps, much like the depressed societies they predominate in, suffer from their own demographic problems: there prevails an unequal and sterile ratio of too many men outnumbering women on sites like Tinder. But any diminishing of the mass of false profiles and fronts for prostitution on the apps would make that disparity even more glaringly obvious, laying bare the abject scarcity of women on MTCH products. Would men want to sign up for pricey Platinum memberships if we knew we’re paying the bouncers to enter a club that looks like a bratwurst factory even inside the VIP booth?

Inaction, for the sake of upholding the illusion that there are options-galore and ample fishing for bachelors seeking a woman online, seems the smarter marketing strategy—even if it is an unethical coverup, misleading and, in some cases, lethal for the consumer.

What to do about these MTCH-related executions of desperate gringos in South America? Let’s hope survivors will not emulate the Tennessee family of Gregory Owens, a black American tourist killed while vacationing in Cartagena: the family announced they’re suing the Colombian government—as if a country could be treated like a business, or an amusement park with faulty rollercoasters. Imagine if any of the families of over 150.000 persons disappeared in the conflict between the Colombian state, paramilitaries and Narcos were to sue their own state! If an American family would go so far as to litigate a foreign country, why not sue an American business, Match, over its incompetence and lack of screening which enabled gangs and homicidal sex-workers to lure foreign victims?

So, why have there been no wrongful-death suits vs. Match Group so far?

A predictable set of hurdles in the legal fine print include app-user terms forcing arbitration (making it tougher to mount public civil cases), Section 230/platform-liability limits within the U.S., causation problems (crime by third parties offline), and jurisdiction/enforcement issues when crimes occur abroad. But what if a legal team representing the victim’s families travelled to the countries where these crimes happened–Colombia and Mexico, foremost–to fight Match there within the legal frameworks of those constitutional democracies? Possibly a narrow view of the world, and the reactionary tendency of Americans like the Owenses to blame South American countries for being stereotypical seamy jungles, are among the biases that blind Western civil societies from the need and the possibilities to tackle MTCH over its complicity in deaths overseas. It’s high time for international judicial activism against a monopoly that has turned so rotten it is by now incurably enmeshed with global crime ecosystems. MTCH can fall, if it is proven that such a vast monopoly over software as simple as that of dating-apps comes at the expense of security and oversight. The sprawling MTCH monopoly has grown so unwieldy that it can no longer ensure the safety of users, or deploy competent task forces against the legion of predators. Grieving families need to be organized and guided by an idealistic legal team. FOIA requests to the State Department (alongside similar petitions to government entities abroad) are crucial here, because families who pay out ransoms to kidnappers tend to settle in quiet, leaving few case logs or numbers publicly available when it comes to abductions.

Victory here would mean more than mere catharsis for the aggrieved and the frustrated: it means grabbing back the reins from an abusive mega-corp that has defaced courtship and deformed our quests for love and pleasure in this de-sexualized dystopia. As soon as the government shutdowns end and funding is restored, I will be emitting a series of FOIAs demanding a reveal on the current number of US citizens who have died dating-app related deaths abroad. (To be continued. Email arturo.desimone@gmail.com for comments)

The post Break Big Tech’s Monopoly on Dating: A Manifesto appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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