Tokyo’s government isn’t taking matchmaking lightly: The app will entail a scrupulous registration process, in which users will have to provide documentation to prove they are “legally single” and willing to get married.

Alongside this, potential procreators will be required to produce 15 pieces of personal info—including height, occupation, and educational background—all of which will be visible to other users. And, just to make things extra romantic, an official tax certificate to verify their annual salary.

The city has already invested $1.28 million into the app, which is due to be launched this summer. It comes amid a population crisis that Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has called the “gravest crisis our country faces.” Births have fallen for the eighth year in a row to 758,631, a drop of around 5 percent.

In 2023, Japan had more than twice as many deaths as it did new babies.

The country is now one of the world’s oldest societies, with population projected to fall by another 30 percent to 87 million by 2070, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. The primary cause of this rapid decline is thought to be lower marriage rates.

In Tokyo, marriage rates are lowest of all, at 32 percent for men and 24 percent for women. In a press briefing earlier this year, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters that the next few years “will be the last chance to reverse the trend.”

“If there are many individuals interested in marriage but unable to find a partner, we want to provide support,” a Tokyo government official told The Asahi Shimbun. “We hope that this app, with its association with the government, will provide a sense of security and encourage those who have been hesitant to use traditional apps to take the first step in their search for a partner.”

Government-sanctioned Tinder may not sound like a meet-cute, but it does have a pretty big advantage: Commercial dating apps aren’t actually “designed to be deleted”—finding a long-term partner removes you from the customer base. Sorry to burst your bubble, but all those times you sadly re-downloaded Hinge were all part of the business model. Tokyo’s app really does have people’s best baby-making interests at heart.

The post The Tokyo Government Is Launching Its Own Sex App appeared first on VICE.

For those on the dating scene, the complete consolidation of chance meetings and IRL flirting into algorithmic dating apps has helped a few find soulmates but overwhelmed others with a tiring and arduous quest for connection. While those in relationships continue to face the perennial issues that surface in any long term relationship: How do you keep the spark alive? What happens when someone cheats? And what should you do when something fundamental about your partner changes?

This year we’ve published a wide range of stories that answer all of these questions and more. Below – and in no particular order – we’ve listed what we think are the 15 best VICE articles on the theme of dating and relationships. So let’s start opening some tabs and get that laptop cooling fan purring like a cat.

The “alpha male” influencer’s deeply misogynistic messaging is parroted on school grounds, in workplaces and even within relationships, despite his recent arrest and social media ban. VICE spoke to the women whose relationships collapsed after their boyfriends “fell down the Tate pipeline.”

“I have something to confess,” writes Ryan S. Gladwin, “I found the safest way to cheat on my girlfriend. Usually, infidelity requires covering up hickeys, renaming your new girl as ‘GP Surgery’ in your contacts, and making up new excuses to explain why you’re late from work. In my case, all I had to do was download an app.”

Across the spectrum of singles, people are feeling increasingly dejected and jaded by the draining pursuit of love. We spoke to singletons, sociologists and therapists about why that might be.

In private Facebook groups all across the world, millions of women are discussing the red flags of men they’re dating. Writer Emilie Lavinia tells the story of how these groups became so popular and why they have a dark side.

As Magdalene Taylor writes, you can’t escape the age gap discourse anymore. Each week, a fresh romance makes headlines involving a man in his late 30s or 40s and a woman in her early 20s. But, as she warns, it only distorts reality to compare your relationships to celebrities.

A new survey says around half of women no longer drink on first dates. We met the sober romantics swapping lagers for lattes to ask if doing dry dating actually does make for better connections.

The latest trend in male beauty has nothing to do with six-packs and everything to do with looking like a sexy cheetah. But, as writer Ruchira Sharma explores, “hunter eyes” aren’t a new concept.

Bridging the generational divide can be tough when one of you remembers LimeWire and the other one doesn’t know what an MP3 is. Writer Daisy Jones reports on how relationships go when millennials and zoomers come together.

Hustle culture has finally hit dating. From love surveys to co-working coffee dates, we’re screening potential lovers with streamlined efficiency. Writer Chanté Joseph meets the people who are no longer in the business of dilly-dallying around to find love.

“My first reaction wasn’t upset, genuinely,” says Lauren. “I was just like ‘what the fuck? How did this person even find me?” Writer Ruchira Sharma interviews the people who went on the internet looking for love, but saw their profiles turned into online jokes.

According to a poll done by Tinder, 69 percent of Gen Z believe they’re going to refresh dating standards for the future. Writer Heloise Shadbolt decided to ask a load of Gen Zs for their pioneering advice on very 30-something dating predicaments.

Your partner goes out without you, meets someone, and sleeps with them. Seems like a pretty clear cut case of cheating, right? But, what if it was a momentary snog before their brain kicked into action? Or an almost kiss? What about situations that are, well, a bit more blurry? Writer Eloise Hendy digs into the grey zones of infidelity.

Sometimes people change their minds about what they want from a relationship – and that’s perfectly OK. But what happens when one or both parties want to turn back the clock on their non-monogamous status? Jess Thomson investigates.

Society still shames people for long-term “singledom”, making people who have found themselves without a romantic partner for a long time feel like it’s something to hide. To try and counter this, VICE spoke to people who have been single for years about their experience, and how society regards the “chronically single”.

According to research, being an attractive man improves your socioeconomic position more than being a good-looking woman. But why trust rigorous research when you can simply go and find very attractive men to interrogate?

The post The 15 Greatest Dating Stories We Published in 2023 appeared first on VICE.

His murder is the latest in a string of sometimes deadly robberies aimed at mostly male tourists in Colombia where criminal groups use dating applications and social media to pinpoint their intended victims.

Tou Ger Xiong, a 50-year-old refugee from Laos based in Minnesota who billed himself as America’s “first Hmong comedian,” arrived in Medellin for a vacation on Nov. 29.

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Eh Xiong, his brother, told local news station KSTP-TV that he last heard from his brother on Sunday evening when he asked for $2,000, which he sent. Tou Ger Xiong never confirmed receiving the money. Eh Xiong also said that when he didn’t receive a response after a couple hours, he called Tou Ger Xiong’s roommate, who told him that he also received a phone call from him, saying that he was being “held at gunpoint.”

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Tou Ger Xiong’s body was discovered the next day beside a ravine in a woody area of the Robledo neighborhood of Medellin with more than a dozen stab wounds, authorities said.

Colombian investigator Yiri Milena Amado told local media in a press conference that Tou Ger Xiong went to meet the woman on Sunday and at 7 p.m. he contacted someone in the United States asking for $2,000. Authorities said they believed he may have been killed after he tried to escape.

Colombian authorities have not announced any arrests in the case, but Eh Xiong told KSTP that the police “found some clothes, blood, you know, on the bag, and they were able to confiscate that and apprehend one of the suspects.”

Authorities said that he was the 27th non-migrant foreigner killed in Medellin and the surrounding area in 2023.

In recent years, small criminal groups have targeted tourists in Colombia via dating apps and social media, who believe they are setting up a blind date. Sometimes the tourists are directly kidnapped while on the date, other times they are lured to secluded locations where they are drugged and robbed. Colombia is notorious for robberies using the dangerous sedative scopolamine, also known as “devil’s breath”, which leaves people in a stupor for sometimes days at a time, while their bank accounts are drained. In recent years, other synthetic drugs like clonazepam and benzodiazepines have become more common in similar attacks, which can sometimes be deadly.

In November, 2022 a Vietnamese-American tourist named Paul Nguyen is believed to have died from an overdose of clonazepam in one such attack after meeting a woman on Tinder. Three people, including the woman, were arrested for the crime six months later.

Authorities did not specify how Tou Ger Xiong met the woman, or how he ended up kidnapped.

Tou Ger Xiong’s death hit the Hmong community hard, especially in the Twin Cities area.

Eh Xiong wrote in a statement that Tou Ger Xiong “dedicated his life to building bridges across cultures, to giving voice for those who may not have one, and to working towards justice for all.” The family intends to create a non-profit in his name.

Tou Ger Xiong wrote in a biography available online that his family fled Laos when he was a small child after the communist takeover because his father worked with the C.I.A. In 1996, he created Project Respectism, “an educational service project that uses comedy, storytelling and rap music to bridge cultures and generations. Since then, Project Respectism has evolved into a program that provides cultural entertainment and education for people of all professions and backgrounds.” 

Chee Xiong (no relation), the Director of Partnerships & Development for the Hmong Museum of Minnesota, recalled Tou Ger Xiong’s impact in a post on Facebook.

“A generation of Hmong kids grew up and watched the video cassette of you or saw your live performance at school. We laughed, we giggled, and we awed at seeing someone who looked like us. Someone who understood us, humor we could culturally connect with as first and second generation Hmong Americans. Then we all grew up and saw you in the streets, in the media, drawing attention to pressing matters important to the Hmong community,” said Chee Xiong. “ An huge loss for the Hmong community. Mus zoo koj-os brother Tou Ger Xiong.” 

The post Asian American Comedian Murdered in Colombia After Meeting a Woman Online appeared first on VICE.

This might be a particularly extreme example, but mismatched expectations around booze is an increasingly common mood killer on first dates. According to a new survey by the dating app Flirtini, one in four men and one in five women would turn down a second date with someone who got drunk on the first one. On top of that, the survey also found that 50% of women and 28% of men never drink alcohol on the first date.

I’ll confess, I was taken aback when I first read that stat. All my relationships, past and present, have started by getting pretty sloshed. I mean, how else are you meant to let your guard down enough to allow a stranger to assess your fuckability? Isn’t booze how we Brits bond after all?

It seems we may be witnessing the death of drinking on dates. But is it part of a broader social shift away from excessive merriment and towards more intentional experiences? Or are we all so stressed out by the relentless dating scene that we’re trying to claw back some semblance of control by removing alcohol from the picture?

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“Over the last three years I found myself going on a lot of first and second dates, which were centred around drinking, telling each other our deepest fears, sleeping together and then getting ghosted,” says Cova, 27. She says she didn’t understand what was going wrong, and constantly questioned herself and why she was being treated with such little respect. But then she started to think about the role drink was playing. “I realised I was following a pattern of getting drunk and oversharing with someone, which then created intimacy that was not necessarily natural,” she says.

Billie, 28, agrees that drinking on dates can affect intimacy. She’s recently started seeing someone who rarely drinks, and has found it surprisingly refreshing. “It means the sex is much more engaged,” she says, “and it’s lovely waking up the next day without a hangover.” They did drink on the first date, she says, “but since then it’s been one or two drinks max, and there have been quite a few dates where we didn’t drink at all.”

This sober-ish approach is new for Billie but it’s prompted her to re-think her attitude to dating and drinking in general. “I used to have a drink to calm the nerves while getting ready, and then quite a lot more on the dates,” she says. “Now I think it can hinder everything if you don’t know someone well.” She reckons finding someone you can be comfortable with when sober is the most important thing. “And sober sex is way more fun,” she adds, “I just wish I hadn’t only found this out at 28!”

Age certainly seems to play an important role in all this. It’s no secret that people are settling down later these days. And, apologies to the 20-something boozehounds out there, it’s no secret that drinking loses some of its allure as you approach 30 and your hangovers become more vigorous. Sabrina, 30, has found herself drifting towards a lifestyle that revolves less around booze. “I think it’s quite a different dating experience in your early 20s than – God, I have to say 30s now don’t I?” she says, with a tone of relatable horror.

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Sabrina did Dry January this year, and found that she was less tired and sluggish. “Now I deliberately have a few days off in the week, and sometimes try to not drink at all from Monday to Friday,” she says. “But I find it hard not to think of a date night as one of my drinking days – it’s just weird to sit and talk to a stranger for hours. Drinking helps you relax a bit.” Having said this, she tells VICE that some of her recent “standout” dates have been the sober occasions. On one, Sabrina says they were both upfront and honest about feeling hungover. “It was a Sunday date and we went for dinner and didn’t drink – it was one of my best dates,” she says.

LGBTQ+ dating expert and Queer Love Stories podcast host, Eden Heath, aged 30, started his sobriety journey in December 2022. He’d just ended a two-and-a-half-year relationship and was feeling concerned about his alcohol consumption. “I began dating again in April this year,” he tells VICE, “only this time completely sober. The main difference I find is that I have more clarity on my feelings towards the person and whether I want to go on a second date,” he says.

His go-to first date is getting coffee. “The best thing about a coffee date is that it’s the perfect opportunity to suss out your potential suitor and decide if you’d like to go on a second date, without breaking the bank. If either of you aren’t quite feeling it there’s no obligation to get a second coffee,” Heath says. “And the best-case scenario, if you don’t want the date to end, you can extend it by living out your Sex and the City fantasy and heading to your local museum or art gallery. Very cosmopolitan, but without the vodka!”

Heath acknowledges that, sans alcohol, your first sober date “may be nerve-wracking”. But, he stresses that “the most important ingredient” is that your date is understanding and non-judgemental. “Don’t feel pressured into explaining your reasons for not drinking,” he says. “If someone tries to peer pressure you into drinking on the first date then they’re probably not the right match for you anyway.”

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Resisting this kind of peer pressure is hard though, particularly when so much of British culture revolves around drinking. “I think it’s hard not to revert to it, especially in winter,” says Billie. “We’re definitely lacking places to go where there isn’t a temptation to drink.” Times are changing though, and if there’s one good thing to come out of the wellness boom, it’s the uptick in sober events and spaces.

“Over the last few years there’s been a notable shift in people’s attitudes towards alcohol as we become more health conscious as a society,” Heath agrees. “It’s my personal belief that this should be a welcome shift in the dating landscape to support people in creating lasting, meaningful connections.” He continues: “Above all, the best advice I can give to anyone dating, sober or not, is to use those first few dates to check how well-aligned you are for a future match. But most importantly, dating should be fun, so don’t get caught up in the process and forget to let your personality shine.”

@eloisehendy

The post The Death of Drinking on Dates appeared first on VICE.

Like many young women using dating apps, the 23-year-old American had to fend off her fair share of pushy men. One of them was a match on Bumble, with whom she initially hit it off: they moved from the app to iMessage, and texted for a bit. “Eventually he ended up asking me to come to my apartment,” she says. “I said no, and eventually he asked me on a date. I figured it wasn’t a big deal that he asked to come over and just thought maybe I would go on the date.”

But the more she thought about it, the less comfortable she felt at how forward he’d been. She politely declined the invite. “He didn’t seem to respond well to that,” she says. So she stopped texting him on iMessage, and went to Bumble to unmatch with him so he couldn’t get in contact.

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That’s when she realised she couldn’t log in. She tried to reset the password, to close the app and restart it, but nothing worked. “I realised I was banned,” she says. Bailey tried to move over to Hinge, which is owned by a separate company, dating app conglomerate Match Group, but wasn’t able to create an account there, either. She next downloaded Tinder, which is owned by the same parent company as Hinge, and faced the same issue.

“I emailed Tinder customer support, and was told I ‘violated their terms’ but that’s all they would tell me,” she says. “Just a generic email. I kept asking what did I do wrong? And I got no answer. I also reached out to Bumble, but never got a reply.” (Bumble has been approached for comment.)

Bailey believes that she’d fallen victim to something that’s spoken about begrudgingly by those on Reddit forums dedicated to online dating: weaponised reporting, in which people – usually scorned dates – retaliate by incorrectly reporting that the person who shunned them had done something against the app’s terms and conditions. “I think it would be too much of a coincidence to get banned right after rejecting that guy who seemed to not take it too well,” she says. “My theory is that he reported me for doing something truly horrible and made up a lie about me.”

Reporting accounts for fictional violations of apps’ terms and conditions happens a lot on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, where copyright strikes or false reports of infractions can harm a user’s ability to earn money. “Malicious reporting is definitely a thing that people discussed in our research,” says Kath Albury, professor of media and communication at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, who studies online dating apps. 

“I noticed that Bumble – not in the Match Group – recently updated its safety policies and explicitly said that ‘not liking’ someone was not grounds for reporting and it would take action against users who exhibited a pattern of vexatious reporting,” Albury adds. 

Weaponised reporting also appears to be commonplace against those who don’t fit into traditional binary gender categorisation. “The email about the update specifically noted that it was not okay to report trans people for the ‘crime’ of being trans,” says Albury.

Being separated from a stream of income thanks to vengeful YouTube and TikTok commenters is bad enough for a digital creator. But being locked out of dating apps can be far more significant for young people looking for a lifelong partner. 

Stanford University’s How Couples Meet and Stay Together survey has been tracking how US couples meet for nearly 15 years, and using pre-existing data to track back the sparks that kindled relationships since the 1940s. Four in 10 heterosexual couples met online according to the latest wave of data, gathered in 2017, up from 22 percent in 2009.

People unable to get onto those apps are potentially losing out on finding their life partner (or simply a hot date), and given the concentration of Match Group, which owns five of the top eight dating apps by market share, being banned from its services can be terminal. Match Group apps account for two-thirds of the online dating market, according to the Business of Apps.

It’s an issue that weighs heavy on Bailey’s mind. “Being banned off all the Match Group apps definitely ruins my chance of online dating,” she says. It’s also something that worries Reddit user reelmeish, who declined to give his name, and was banned from Tinder and the whole Match Group. The Redditor is insistent he has done nothing wrong and has no idea why he’s been banned. “I’ve never been rude, never made crude remarks with anyone, and have been on several great dates from Match Group apps,” he says. “I’m not your typical dude that people would think would get banned. Like most people imagine some misogynist; I think Andrew Tate and his ilk are gross.”

Nevertheless, the ban has had a significant impact on his love life. “Being cancelled from Match Group is akin to being cancelled from all dating,” he says. “It really feels bad and is unfair, and it’s a real problem. There is no mechanism to dispute the issue.”

For reelmeish, there’s also a lack of closure as to why he was blocked from all the Match Group apps. “They do not even tell you what you did or why they banned you,” he says. “It could be a mistake, it could be retaliation, it could be anything, but you don’t even get a chance. I understand it’s their site and they have the right, but it sucks from a personal standpoint.” 

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The challenge is that bans, when they’re handed out, are pretty absolute. The companies overseeing dating apps can not just ban usernames and email addresses, but also IP addresses (from where you log onto the internet) and device identifiers, meaning that individual devices can be barred from rejoining apps.

The reasons for both Bailey and reelmeish’s bans are still unclear to them. They were informed of their bans through generic notifications. Their messages to the platforms were ignored. “I’m not sure if Match Group has similarly cautioned users [like Bumble] around using the report button punitively – and I’m not sure if the decision to ban this particular user was automated, or made by a human moderator,” says Albury. “These are the kinds of things I would ask the company in the name of safety and fairness for all users.”

Match Group spokesperson Kayla Whaling says that identifying the specific users mentioned in this story was difficult because of their pseudonymity. However, generally, the company has support teams for each of the brands under the Match Group umbrella, who look into individual reports by users to take action on the account, which can include removing it.

“If it’s believed the account belongs to a bad actor and/or we received a report that the account’s user was in violation of our terms and conditions, we will remove the account across Match Group’s platforms,” she adds. “If someone believes they may have been banned incorrectly, we encourage users to reach out to support so we can look into it further.”

For Bailey, being banned has had an impact on her dating life. But she’s found a way through it all: Meeting people the old-fashioned way. “I am just not using dating apps anymore and it is for the better,” she says. “People on there are not genuine.”

The post I’ve Been Banned From Almost Every Dating App appeared first on VICE.

Are you capable of communicating honestly and openly? – Yes – No 

You are called for your first dick appointment; how’s it going down? 

How would you describe your sense of humour?

“I think I got more than 60 responses overall,” she tells VICE. “The amount actually exceeded the free limit from my SurveyMonkey account.” Gwaze asked her dating app matches to fill out this survey after they’d been speaking for a short while. In its introduction, Gwaze was explicit about what she required from applicants.

“Seeking an attractive male for frequent consensual relations,” she opens with. “The chosen candidate must be non-discriminatory regarding race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, religion, class etc.” The most desirable candidates are those that “drive and/or have their own place”, and those who don’t fit the category and apply anyway will receive a fine for wasting her time. She confesses that the survey does seem “a bit unhinged” but stresses she made it clear that filling it out was always optional. After two months of receiving candidates, she found her partner (now ex) and shut down the operation completely.

This is a level of dedication and organisation regarding dating that I can only dream of having – it all feels foreign to me. After swiping on apps for 15 minutes, I immediately lose the will to live, but it seems this is dating in 2023. Gwaze is part of a generation of daters who are no longer in the business of dilly-dallying around to find love.

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Surveys like Gwaze’s are one of many ways people are sifting through potential lovers with ultimate efficiency. There’s the people who screen potential partners with voice notes; the cost-effective “daylight savings trend” that uses oddly timed happy hours and skiving off while working from home to squeeze in dates; the ten minute microdaters; some people are taking it as far as turning dates into co-working coffees to prevent time-wasting.

This might all seem inexplicably unromantic, but are they actually onto something? Research from eHarmony finds that the average dating app user spends 55 minutes a day on the apps, managing six conversations at a time – those diligently dedicated to the search have over 15 conversations on the go at once. Perhaps it really is time to cut-out all the endless small talk and get straight to the point – time is a finite resource, after all.

Maybe there’s some merit in dating devoid of the randomness of romance? We’re taught to work hard for everything we want in life, but love is always the exception: It’s supposed to just show up when we “least expect it”, no effort required. If anything, trying is viewed as “too desperate” and offputting, which encourages people to do nothing about their love life. Surely it can’t be a good idea to be subject to the whims of fate in this one area of life?

“I wasn’t looking for pen pals.” —Morgan

Morgan, 26, agrees. Like others in this piece, she’s turned dating into an organisational system that management accountants would foam at the mouth for – and has asked to remain anonymous for privacy reasons. After spending three and half years single up north, Morgan moved to London and had 12 dates in ten days, the sign of a true optimised-dating champion.

“On the last day, I had an afternoon date at the Tate and another one by the canal for drinks that evening,” she says. It was this whimsical Thames water date that sealed it for Morgan – the date ended up lasting three days and they’ve been together for six months. So really, all it took was 18 days, a thorough filtering system and extreme time management skills to find the man of her dreams.

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Her approach was simple: She signed up for Hinge, Tinder, and Bumble and always aimed to have dates arranged within a week – “I wasn’t looking for pen pals,” continues Morgan. She also axed anyone that was overtly sexual too soon, anyone with “weird vibes” and, most importantly, anyone that spoke in riddles.

 “Online dating becomes a paradox of choice,” viral psychotherapist and author Tasha Bailey tells VICE, when asked why can be bothered for such extremes. “We look for an action plan to navigate it by trying to gain some control. This plan can give us some calm and clarity over the chaos of the dating world and just how fatiguing it is to navigate.” Bailey describes this as “dating paralysis”. It’s common to feel like there’s an endless supply of people to date, but so few to build and nurture a proper relationship with. Perhaps this is down to the mere illusion of choice – half of the single Brits on apps are actually on there for an ego boost or casual fling, according to eHarmony. Filtering and optimising dating becomes paramount in the search for genuine love, but Bailey also believes it touches on something else deeper – the overwhelming threat of getting burned.

“By taking on a management role in our romantic lives, we distance ourselves from the emotional involvement and intimacy needed to find a partner,” Bailey continues. “This might be our way of protecting ourselves from being rejected, ghosted or heartbroken by treating every potential new suitor like a business meeting.”

It’s a feeling I know too well. Heartbreak is timely and costly; I deal with heartbreak by overindulging in expensive clothes and trips, distracting myself from my emotions, and as a consequence, the other important things in my life. My approach to dating has now become devoid of romance, and rather than going down the “unhinged” survey route, everyone is at arm’s length and “it’s not that serious” is my new mantra.

Bailey thinks this sense of order and urgency for others has been powered by the pandemic. “Following years of lockdown, we’ve ‘lost’ two years of regular life, and this has led some of us to feel the urgency of dating in fear of wasting more time,” she tells VICE. This idea came up in most of the conversations I had with daters: Time is scarce, and nothing made that feel more real than Covid-19 did.

Plus, if Gwaze and Morgan found partners with this process, it can’t be as bad as it sounds – even Bailey admits optimising dating can have its positives. “Dating in a scheduled way can give us a sense of autonomy in our dating lives. As much as we can’t control what chemistry we develop with someone, we can have some autonomy over how much of our time we give them,” she adds. “It also helps us to practise boundaries – rather than getting completely swept up in our dating lives, dating efficiency helps us not to lose sight of all our needs and achievements.”

I wonder what this means for the long-term, though, if we treat all potential lovers like prospective hires rather than people: Will it harm our ability to foster organic healthy relationships?

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Bailey speculates it can be just as fickle as swiping on apps all day with an ever-growing list of icks that make it impossible for anyone to make the cut. “When we streamline dating in this way, we leave out all the opportunities for self-learning and for a courtship to grow,” she says. “We end up leaving at the slightest inconvenience by moving onto our next option for the sake of efficiency, which means we then never have to take accountability for our part in things.” We also don’t always get to bring our true selves, warns Baily, meaning the people we’re dating won’t get a full experience of our vulnerability and our capacity for emotional intimacy.

It’s official, cutting corners in dating to maximise efficiency could turn you into an emotionless robot – or you could find the love of your life, who knows? The intentions of dating optimisation make sense, but it also speaks to collective dating fatigue, where we’re all exhausted and eagerly yearning for love but too burned to find it in healthier ways. If this sounds like you, Bailey recommends taking a break from hustle-culture dating and investing that time with your social groups and yourself, until you feel ready to brazen the cold streets once again. If you’re more than ready for love, though, why not stop skipping over those Monday.com workflow ads on YouTube and start project managing your love life? It might turn out being the most enjoyable job you’ve ever had.

@ChantayyJayy

The post Welcome to the Era of Optimisation Dating appeared first on VICE.

Although it’s unclear if participants have had any tangible success yet, it still demonstrates how Facebook’s LLaMA model is being used in the wild after the company lost control of it in a leak earlier this month. Last week, OpenAI released GPT4, its latest iteration of its own AI. That comes with many guardrails and stops users from asking the AI to generate all sorts of material. In Motherboard’s own tests, GPT4 will generate text for Tinder profiles if asked to do so, and do a better job than current implementations of Facebook’s leaked model. Still, Facebook’s leaked model has no protections in place, meaning users are free to experiment with it however they see fit, with AI-dating likely just being one of the first applications.

“The plan is to develop a series of prompts so that the AI ‘assist’ you in establishing a conversation. I believe this can encourage many people to start chatting,” Alfredo Ortega, an information security software engineer who created a Discord bot for others to interface with Facebook’s leaked AI, told Motherboard in an online chat.

Do you know anything else about the LLaMa leak? Are you using it for any projects? We’d love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.

On his Discord server, Ortega laid out the process for using the bot to generate material for Tinder. “The aim of this channel is to conduct continuous research to discover the smallest LLM model capable of arranging a date with a human, male or female. Use the AI as a proxy: Give the AI the conversations with your match, and write back the answer to the dating-app chat. Please anonymize any information before posting,” Ortega wrote.

Earlier this month Ortega used Facebook’s leaked large language mode to make the Discord chat bot which he called “BasedGPT.” Elon Musk previously said he wanted to create a “based AI” as an alternative to Bing’s ChatGPT, which he and other conservatives believe is too “woke.”

Facebook originally made LLaMA only available to approved researchers and other parties, but a 4chan user quickly leaked it on the forum.

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One user in the Tinder-focused channel wrote “I’ve got 50 likes on Tinder because I never actually swipe right on anyone, I just watch the number go up as a vacuous sense of validation. This will finally allow me to put those likes to use, lmao.”

The Facebook AI-powered bot is fairly basic, but it is able to generate what a conversation on Tinder may look like and complete the text of potential Tinder profiles when given a prompt. In one example, the AI generated messages such as “Hey, I like your dog. Wanna get a drink sometime?” and “There’s this new bar that just opened up on Main Street. Have you been there yet?”

“Hmm, promising,” one user wrote in response. The AI did have a problem generating a “flirty” conversation, though.

At the moment, the Tinder project requires a user to manually take the bot’s output and paste it into Tinder themselves if they wish. Ortega said it’s “just a matter of time” until someone automates the process.

“Conversations in online-dating are not very complex, mostly about setting up a date, I believe even a very small LLM [large language models] can automate this,” Ortega told Motherboard.

Facebook previously told Motherboard in a statement that “We have made clear that the LLaMA foundational models were released by Meta for the purposes of research only. In line with industry practices, if we find a suspected violation of the LLaMA research license we investigate.”

Tinder did not respond to a request for comment on whether using AI to generate parts of profiles or conversations is against its terms of use.

Last week Motherboard reported on CupidBot, an app allegedly made by disenfranchised ex-Tinder employees which uses AI chatbots to speak to women on men’s behalf. The purpose is to combat the “disadvantages the average man” faces in online dating. (Later, the creators retracted those claims about being ex-Tinder employees, and told Motherboard “We do not and have not hired any ex-Tinder engineers.”)

Update: This piece has been updated to include more information from the creators of CupidBot.

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The post People Trying to Use Facebook’s Leaked AI to Improve Their Tinder Matches appeared first on VICE.

[Update 3/23/2023, 10:25 a.m. EST: Following publication, the group retracted their previous claims made on their website and in an interview with Motherboard that they formerly worked at Tinder, and stated, “We do not and have not hired any ex-Tinder engineers.”

12:55 p.m. EST: A spokesperson for Tinder told Motherboard: “Tinder has no evidence of CupidBot’s cofounders being former employees of Tinder or Match Group. We have no evidence of the bot being used on the platform at this point.”]

The app makes some big promises: For $15 a month beta access, users can expect to “get several dates a week by doing absolutely nothing,” according to CupidBot’s website. The AI algorithm will “swipe on girls that are just your type and constantly works to get high quality matches,” and then a chatbot talks with the women, until they agree to go on a date and arrange a time and place to meet. The date then gets added to the CupidBot user’s calendar.

Their algorithm, a spokesperson for CupidBot told Motherboard, is trained on individual users’ past matches and will only swipe yes on people who look like a user’s pre-CupidBot matches. The app has been in private alpha development since February, and moved into public beta a few days ago. Motherboard bought beta access to the app, but after purchasing, received an email saying that we’re user #5,027 who have signed up for beta, and wouldn’t get access until March 31.

The bot doesn’t disclose that it’s a bot, the spokesperson said, so matches can chat with a bot extensively before they have any idea it’s not a real human. “We do strongly advise our users to tell the women once they’ve gotten their contact information,” the spokesperson told Motherboard. “The data shows that the first few back and forths required to get a woman’s phone number does not tend to be particularly memorable nor have any affect on a date occurring. What really skews the probability of a date is how you build rapport once you have her number.” They said that their goal is not to “saturate the app” with AI conversations, or to “objectify women,” but to “force Tinder to reevaluate how it operates and to facilitate the dating process for some people in the meantime.”

A casual poll of women using dating apps for this story revealed that the first few conversational exchanges that happen on an app do actually matter to them, and help gauge what type of person this internet stranger is before agreeing to meet them in real life. But CupidBot thinks it can use AI to cut that part of the equation down to an algorithmic exchange.

CupidBot is made with straight men—that terminally underrepresented group—as its focus. According to its website, the bot is founded by “a team of ex-Tinder engineers dedicated to enhancing the dating lives of men,” and promises that it will “match with girls that are just your type.”

“We focus on the dating lives of straight men because they suffer most from dating apps. It takes immense time for the average man to scrape together even one date a month,” the CupidBot spokesperson said. “Although CupidBot can be used by anyone, we’ve built it with the average man in mind.” They added that while they think heterosexual men seeking heterosexual women are the “most disadvantaged” in Tinder’s structure, their tool could be applied to any dating preference.

They told Motherboard that they weren’t expecting the app to go viral on Twitter, and have kept their names anonymous for now. “There are ethical considerations involved in what we’ve built, and we are not keen on attaching our names to a guerrilla side project just yet,” the spokesperson said.

The founders of the app claim that at Tinder (they declined to provide any specific evidence that they did in fact work at Tinder) they felt frustrated by what they saw as their former company’s incentivization of online dating misery, especially for men. “Dating apps profit from continued engagement and thus do not, and cannot, put the best interest of users first,” a spokesperson for CupidBot told Motherboard. “This carefully designed system particularly disadvantages the average man seeking to meet women on real life dates. Given the real psychological impact that success in dating, or lack thereof, has on youths, and young men in particular, Tinder’s modus operandi is of net social detriment.”

Men make up the majority of Tinder users (a claim the founders make that’s repeated by website statistics website Statista, but not officially confirmed by the company) and men and women have “large differences in behavior and motive,” CupidBot said, “many women tending to disproportionately favor the top 5% profiles and some using the apps as an elixir for validation, there is agonizing asymmetry in user experience.” They added that women tend to be more cautious users who take longer to decide whether to swipe right.

Women also face disproportionate amounts of harassment on dating apps (and on the internet in general), including stalking and violent language, and are more likely than men to see dating apps as unsafe. But the founders of CupidBot think that hooking them up with a secret AI chatbot as a first impression will definitely be what turns guys’ game around on the apps.

The post Great, Dating Apps Are Getting More Hellish Thanks to AI Chatbots appeared first on VICE.

Their first date – a couple of drinks after work – had been the most fun she’d had in a while. The pair went on to meet twice a week afterwards: more drinks, dinners, movie nights – Jack even took Flo to a warehouse rave with his best friends.

They never put a label on it – there didn’t seem to be a need to – but a flush would warm Flo’s cheeks whenever his name lit up her phone. That was until one day, Jack stopped texting. No explanation, no response: Flo had been blocked, with her WhatsApp messages to Jack now punctuated with a lonely grey tick.

“I was upset,” publicist Flo, 24, reflects, a year later. Like every dater in this piece, she’s speaking anonymously to protect her privacy. “But this sort of stuff happens all the time. I’ve been ghosted before and I’ll get ghosted again. But part of me thinks what’s the fucking point? It makes me just not want to bother with dating.”

Flo’s sentiments are echoed across the spectrum of singles who are feeling increasingly dejected and jaded in the arduous quest to find love. A 2022 US study showed four in five adults “experienced some degree of emotional fatigue” from online dating. Elsewhere, research from Hinge found 61 percent of their users find the modern dating process “overwhelming”.

It’s something Jasmin, a 28-year-old writer, has sometimes felt over the last three years. Having met her previous two partners through school and work, she decided to try her luck with dating apps.

“I flip between an abundance and scarcity mindset,” she explains. “There’s times where I felt overwhelmed I’m matching with so many guys. It almost feels like a game. But then translating those matches into actual, decent dating experiences is so sparse I feel there’s nothing out there.”

Since the advent of Tinder in 2012, apps have vastly altered how we date. They’re certainly not going anywhere any time soon – 300 million people have a dating app profile, and come 2035, more people will have met their partner online than in real life.

“Dating apps changed the digital dating landscape due to the collection of convenient features they brought to the table, which I have called ‘intimacies of convenience,’” explains Dr Rachel Katz, a digital media sociologist at the University of Salford who researches dating apps. “They are often image-based, mobile, geolocative, use a swiping mechanism, and have a ‘consent to chat’ feature. People had an active role in choosing who they wanted to match with.

“People like the convenience these features enable. But at the same time, this convenience can also bring negative experiences: transactional language, ghosting and objectifying language. Moreover, there are fewer social ramifications to these behaviours on dating apps compared to real-life interactions – it’s possible that repeated negative experiences might lead to dating app fatigue.

“Decision fatigue, and the paradox of choice, may be part of what people find frustrating about dating apps.”

The convenience of having a vast number of connections may have come at a cost of the quality of communication between matches, adds psychotherapist and couple’s counsellor Hilda Burke.

“Dating apps make initial matches text-based,” she explains. “In his book Silent Messages, Professor Albert Mehrabian developed the theory that only 7 percent of meaning is communicated through what we say: 38 percent is through tone of voice, 55 percent is through body language. We are so text dependent on dating apps, we’re only getting about 7 percent of what that person means. It allows for ambiguity to develop.”

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This widening canyon of uncertainty, and additional layers of grey area, may be contributing to “mismatched goals” between daters, adds Katz.

“People use dating apps for multiple reasons like dating app tourism, hooking up, chatting to combat loneliness, boosting self-esteem, and finding long-term partner,” she says. “Different mindsets, times, and spaces affect these goals of use. There’s also clashes over when to convey these goals, and how – hence ghosting, or having the conversation turn sexual too soon.”

But why the growing vocal backlash against dating culture now? Maybe a decade of exploring an increasingly vague hellscape has left singles exhausted and fed up, explains Jodie Cariss, therapist and founder of Self Space, a mental health service which runs regular Slow Dating events.

“The amount of immediate gratification and choice that’s available to people, alongside the distance that being behind an app gives us, makes the dating world much easier to hide in without investing too deeply in the human behind the apps,” she says. “We become more hidden and disconnected, and perhaps lonelier for it.”

For Flo, forging a connection in the texting preamble is her least favourite part of the modern dating process. “I feel like so much of the conversation is copy pasted, all the chat is the same,” she explains. “I’m not much of a texter myself. But when someone I’ve matched with doesn’t text me for a day, I just instantly think they’re just ghosting me.”

Ghosting is an increasingly common phenomenon. A study conducted this year by the University of Georgia found two in three people have ghosted someone they were dating – and been a victim of ghosting themselves.

“It’s depressing that it feels almost flattering when someone is polite enough just to let you know they didn’t feel a spark,” Flo explains. “It feels like dating someone is like having a tab open, and people close that tab when they’re done. In a city like London, you’re unlikely to see a match again – there’s no repercussions. It makes me have my guard up from the start, and I keep my dates at an arms’ length.”

This lack of accountability isn’t relegated to straight dating: Dan, who has been single for four years, has seen an influx of “cruel” behaviour from guys he’s matched with.

“It’s almost as if people date for content now,” the author and broadcaster says. “I’ve seen people sharing just savage screenshots from Grindr on social media just for likes. I do think we need a huge ethics shift in dating. We’ve fallen down this ugly hole of treating people badly because we can. We need to remember we’re dating the person, not the phone number.”

Having had a sequence of poor dates, Flo has changed her priorities. Tired of swiping, she is putting emphasis on established platonic relationship. “I was on my own in lockdown,” she said. “When restrictions eased, I wanted to spend time with friends and family and have a guaranteed good time, rather than dating. Now with the increased cost of living, I’d rather spend money seeing friends than go on dates that go nowhere.”

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Jasmin adds time is a resource she’s sick of wasting. “I’m open to meeting someone, but if I’m happy with my life the way it is right now,’ she says. “I know I have to give time to get to know someone, but I’ve got my own place, a good job and good friends. It would take something special – but we’re all holding back on dates or hedging our bets on many options.

“I’m sick of the dystopian and clinical nature of dating apps. The gatekeeping apps like Hinge and Tinder do to try and get you to pay for the premium version, teasing that you could meet ‘The One’ if you pay. It feels wrong that who you get to meet is being dictated by apps, so I’m trying to not use them so much.”

Jasmin is not alone when it comes to choosing to meet people in real life: In 2021, Eventbrite saw a 200 percent increase in attendance at speed dating events. Meanwhile, apps such as Thursday and Bumble are trying a hybrid approach, offering real-life events alongside app messaging.

For Dan, he’s meeting more men in bars and clubs, finding he has better luck in sparking connections that way. Meanwhile, Jasmin has started approaching guys at gigs and at the gym.

“Dating is a bastard, but the pandemic and cost of living has shown that we’re ready and able to adapt the way we date,” Dan explains. “We continue to date in the circumstances were given. Whether that’s apps, or real life, or somewhere in between. How we date is shaped by the current climate.”

Jasmin agrees, and is optimistic that the general sense of dejection around dating will lead to a kinder and more considerate way to date.

“But dating fatigue will always be something everyone will have to juggle,” she adds. “It will always be messy and complicated as people are messy and complicated. It will never be something that’s easy and pain free.”

The post Why Does Dating Suck Right Now? appeared first on VICE.

“I thought, ‘well, he looks alright. He’s into his sport. He’s kind of my cup of tea, looks-wise. Give him a swipe,’” Lisa, an English woman in her 30s, told VICE World News. “Then everything just went mad.”

“I had no idea it could lead to all of this, just talking to somebody on Tinder.”

This was in early 2016, and the profile belonged to Andrew Tate, now infamous around the world as a misogynistic “manosphere” influencer and alleged human trafficker, but then little known outside kickboxing circles in the UK.

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Lisa agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity; she doesn’t want her real name used for fear of retribution from Tate and his army of online supporters. She said she began chatting with her new match, and they soon went on their first date to a London restaurant, with Tate picking her up and dropping her home again. He generally presented himself as “really charming and very nice,” but different from anyone she’d met before, Lisa said.

He gave her a business card that read: “TATE ENTERPRISES UNLIMITED, KICKBOXING WORLD CHAMPION and also a millionaire and all round nice guy.” On the reverse, it promised he could perform “miracles by appointment” and gave a résumé-style rundown of his purported qualifications and attributes: “assassinations plotted,” “dragon slaying,” “stud service,” “millionaire lifestyle.”

They kept seeing each other, but before long, Lisa noticed that certain things felt off. She became aware of social media posts that showed Tate with a lot of other women. When she started asking more questions about his lifestyle, he responded with an ultimatum: if she wanted to be his girlfriend, she would have to come and live with him and work for him, although he was initially cagey on exactly what he did, or where he was based.

Eventually, Lisa was able to get to the truth. Tate was running a webcam sex business based in Romania, with ambitions to expand the operation elsewhere. The job he was pushing her to take – as documented in WhatsApp messages and voicenotes shared by Lisa with VICE World News – would involve performing sexually on camera, or chatting sexually with men online, or helping to “manage” the other women in the company, although he insisted she’d invariably need to perform on camera herself to properly understand the business.

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She said she came to realise that Tate was using apps such as Tinder to meet and recruit women like her en masse for the business, attempting to “groom them” using the so-called “loverboy” technique – a strategy where men attempt to make women fall in love with them in order to exploit them in the sex industry.

Investigators in Romania, where Tate and his brother Tristan are being held as part of a probe into allegations of human trafficking and rape, have accused the brothers of using the “loverboy” method to recruit women into working for their webcam operation. The prosecutors allege that at least six women were “sexually exploited” by what it called an “organised criminal group” involving the Tates, who deny the charges against them. When the judge in Bucharest extended the Tates’ detention for an extra 30 days last month, he cited their “capacity and effort to exercise permanent psychological control over the victims.”

Tate himself has openly endorsed the strategy, selling online courses, including a so-called “Pimping Hos Degree” or “PHD” program, instructing his followers about how to meet women through social media, have sex with them, make the women fall in love with them, and then recruit them to work for their webcam sex business.

Lisa said she had no intention of being exploited by Tate and, once she realised what he was up to, called him out.

“I said to him, ‘I know what your game is, you’re recruiting people on Tinder,’” she told VICE World News. “What he does is groom people.”

Lisa is one of several women who spoke to VICE World News about being approached by Andrew Tate on apps such as Instagram and Tinder, harnessing the platforms as tools in his hunt to recruit young women around the world, targeting some as young as 16, for his webcam sex business.

If you have information to share with us that pertains to this story, we’d like to hear from you. You can send an email to docteam@vice.com, or contact us via Twitter at @tim_hume, @JamieTahsin, or @Matt_A_Shea. Alternatively, you can create a Proton Mail account, which stores and transmits messages in an encrypted format, and email us at viceteam@proton.me.

Their accounts illustrate the so-called “loverboy” method: using social media to approach women en masse in an attempt to generate a response and eventually sleep with them, then alternating between charming or intimidating them in their efforts to exert control over them. The latter, according to 2015 research on human trafficking carried out by a public watchdog in Belgium, is a crucial tactic that loverboy pimps use to exert control over their victims: “treating [women] nicely on one occasion, and badly the next, in order to … reinforce their loyalty.”

The loverboy method existed long before the invention of social media, or the arrival of Andrew Tate into the public consciousness. But Tate’s brazen promotion of his strategies has clearly highlighted the dangerous potential of what happens when the method is amplified with social media technology, weaponising popular apps as powerful tools for recruiting, grooming and exploiting women around the world.

It’s a problem that’s attracted the attention of governments. A Dutch government webpage on human trafficking notes that social media is “playing an increasing role” in the loverboy phenomenon, giving traffickers “much greater scope for establishing contact with victims and gathering information about vulnerable boys and girls” and making it “easier for them to force their young victims into the sex industry.”

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Tate has taught these same exploitative techniques to legions of his followers, through online video training courses such as the “‘PHD,” which he sold on his website for £377 to £778. While the course is no longer available on his website, links to the content can still be found online.

Adapting techniques from the so-called “pick-up artist” subculture, Tate’s “PHD” course promised to teach his followers how to target women on social media, have sex with them, get them to fall in love and exert psychological control over them. A related Tate video training course called “Webcam,” which is also no longer available on Tate’s website but remains accessible elsewhere online, followed on from the “PHD” in promising to teach men how to groom their newly acquired multiple girlfriends to work in the sex webcam business. VICE World News has viewed both training courses in their entirety.

“My job was to get women to fall in love with me. Literally,” reads a since-deleted page on Tate’s website advertising the PHD course. “[M]eet a girl, go on a few dates, sleep with her, test if she’s quality, get her to fall in love with me to where she’d do anything I say, and then get her on webcam so we could become rich together.”

In the “Webcam” course, Tate states that the “psychological aspect” of his teachings was the same as in “street pimping,” in that they relied on encouraging a woman to love their pimp, rather than fear him.

“This is one of the biggest things people don’t understand about the pimp game,” he said. “She has to respect you and love you and want to work with you.”

Records of voicenotes and WhatsApp messages from Tate, shared by Lisa with VICE World News, clearly document these nakedly manipulative attempts to groom her into working for him, in what she now understands to be a textbook case of “loverboy” grooming.

The proposition he consistently put forward to Lisa in these messages and voicenotes was that being his girlfriend would mean living with him and working for him; in return for her labour, and faithfully obeying his instructions, she would get access to his supposedly luxurious, jetset lifestyle, and his love.

“Lie to some twats, make money, see me every day,” was the formula he proposed in one message, seen by VICE World News.

And although she could not expect him to be sexually exclusive with her, his true feelings for her would be above any other woman, he promised.

“I didn’t realise at the time how clever he was with his grooming tactics,” said Lisa. “He would just sort of sell you a lifestyle.”

In the messages, Tate repeatedly pushed Lisa to try performing sexually on camera – something she had no interest in doing. In one exchange, he tried to set up a date for them, during which he suggested she could “try the cam thing, just try it [and] see how easy it is.” He dangled the carrot of her potentially managing a webcam business he is planning to open in Amsterdam.

“You can’t manage the business if [you] don’t know the buisness [sic], so you’d have to do [cam work] for a few weeks first,” he wrote. “Maybe if you like it, relocating to [Amsterdam] becomes more realistic.”

In another exchange, Tate tried to set up a call between Lisa and one of his female employees with the goal that they can “become friends” and that she can reassure Lisa about working for him.

“Ask her what life’s like, then decide,” he wrote. “She takes cash off losers on a computer. No one fucks her. No one touches her… It’s all a game.”

This strategy, of using female webcammers to put the hard sell on potential recruits to join the industry, is one Tate explicitly advocates in his online teachings. In his “Webcam” course, Tate talked about getting trusted women who already work for him to “sell” the proposition of webcam work to potential recruits.

“You don’t do the selling,” he said. “The girl has to hear from a girl.”

Lisa said this was a tactic he was clearly trying with her. “He would try to use women to manipulate other women into coming and joining the party, if you know what I mean,” she said.

When Tate became frustrated that his techniques weren’t persuading Lisa to work for him, he switched to a more domineering tone in his messaging, making big promises and more urgent demands. Lisa said he became highly controlling, demanding that she pick up her phone if he couldn’t reach her.

In one voicenote shared with VICE World News, an exasperated-sounding Tate issued ultimatums.

“I’m having kids in a year, one. Two, you’re going to do as I say, regarding absolutely everything else: where we live, where we go, everything. Otherwise we have absolutely nothing to talk about,” he said in the voicenote.

In another voicenote, he instructs her to book a flight to see him immediately. “If you want the king back… you have to fly here. Look at flights, tell me which one you want, I’ll book it,” he said. “Get the fuck over here, and show me you’re sorry. Get on a plane.”

Lisa told VICE World News that she had “cottoned on” relatively quickly that Tate was attempting to manipulate her and other women. Barely a month after they had started dating, she said, the penny dropped that he was using Tinder on his frequent travels to find potential new recruits for his webcam business in each location.

On the 16th of February, 2016, she confronted him in a WhatsApp exchange, accusing him of using the app to mass recruit women like her for his webcam business.

“If this is how you recruit your staff, sleep with them, vet them, make sure they are tough enough to take shit, you need to stop using [T]inder,” she wrote in a message shared with VICE World News.

Tate – who Lisa said was travelling constantly during the six months or so they were in contact, between places like Bucharest, Amsterdam, London, Liverpool, and Thailand – responded by telling her she was “a very smart girl.”

“You need to understand the dynamics of my operation,” he wrote, before explaining that Tinder allowed him to find attractive women.

“I can load [T]inder [R]omania and find better looking girls than [in E]ngland. Easy,” he wrote, before sending her screenshots of a string of young Romanian women he had found on the app.

VICE World News made multiple attempts to contact lawyers acting for Tate seeking his comment for this story, but did not receive a response.

While Tate used Tinder to try to recruit Lisa, it was not the only platform there’s evidence of him using.

A British woman told BBC News she was manipulated into camwork by Tate after he approached her out of the blue on Facebook and they struck up a relationship. The woman’s account bears close resemblance to Lisa’s story, except that she took him up on his invitation to visit him in Bucharest and start working for him.

Another British woman, whom VICE World News has previously reported as having been exploited by Tate, said he groomed her into cam work after they met on Facebook – although her method of recruitment differed from Tate’s apparent standard modus operandi, in that she was put in touch with him via a mutual Facebook friend who claimed Tate wanted to speak with her.

But it was the photo-sharing platform Instagram that Tate considered the perfect app for his methods.

In his “PHD” course, Tate sings the photo-sharing app’s praises, recommending it to his followers as “your number one tool to get laid.”

While he conceded he “had found good girls on Tinder,” he claimed the “problem” with the dating app was that “every girl on Tinder has fucked someone else,” and that “only real ratchet-ass hoes are left on there.”

The reason Instagram was “so fantastic,” he said in the course video, was that “women sit on Instagram all fucking day.” The only real drawback of the app, he said, was that women users were already deluged with DMs from random men; to overcome this, Tate gave his followers a recommended opening line intended to generate “intrigue” and spark interaction through their mass cold-calling.

The “cold opener” entailed simply stating the city of the woman being targeted, followed by a question mark – often adding “a completely pointless emoji on the end, some cherries, or an orange or a strawberry,” according to Tate.

“So the girl sitting there, she’s scrolling through ‘How are you? You’re sexy.’ ‘How are you? You’re sexy.’ … ‘Bucharest? Strawberry,’” Tate explained in the course. “Then they start to think: ‘Why does he want to know where I am? Like, does he want to fuck me? Does he see me? Does he have something of interest for me?’ And they usually reply, ‘Yeah, why?’ … Because they’re interested.”

Daria Gușă was just 16 when she received an unsolicited direct message from Andrew Tate on her Instagram account.

The message on July the 4th, 2020, a screenshot of which she shared with VICE World News, read simply: “Romanian girl” followed by the strawberry emoji.

Gușă, a Romanian student who is now 19 and studying at a UK university, was wary of the approach, feeling it was “creepy” that a man in his 30s, with a huge social media following, would be messaging a high school student.

“It was a very obvious thing,” she told VICE World News during a Zoom call. “I had my high school in my bio, for God’s sake. I only had like 200 followers, and they were all high school students. I can say that there’s not any man with two brain cells in the world who could have thought, ‘Oh, nice, a 25-year-old.’”

“I was like, ‘This is creepy. Definitely something going on.’”

Gușă’s suspicions deepened when she found out shortly afterwards that three of her high school friends in Prahova county, north of the Romanian capital, Bucharest, had also been messaged by Tate around the same time, receiving almost identical short, cryptic messages. “I think he just changed the emojis,” Gușă said.

One of the girls was in her grade at school, while the other two were in the grade below.

Gușă said she was already wary of such advances because there was widespread awareness of the threat of loverboy grooming in Romania, which is a major target for human traffickers. Uncaged, an anti-trafficking charity, says that the loverboy method is “the single-most common method for enslaving Romanian women”; the Romanian government has even distributed posters in schools to raise awareness of “loverboy” grooming.

Nevertheless, two of her three friends responded to Tate and ended up having online conversations with him.

Gușă said that her family connections – her father, Cozmin Gușă, is a high-profile political analyst and former politician in Romania – made her feel like she had the support network to speak up about being targeted by Tate. But her friends did not feel able to do so, fearing being mobbed online by Tate’s army of supporters, as others who have made accusations against him have done.

Gușă’s friends showed her the messages they had exchanged with Tate at the time, in online conversations that had followed a similar pattern, she said. Initially he complimented their looks, telling them they were beautiful, then asked if they wanted to meet up, promising to take them to a particular restaurant or pick them up in a fancy car. When they stopped replying because they did not want to meet him, Gușă said, Tate responded with abusive messages insulting them.

Gușă is relieved that neither she nor her friends met up with Tate, and has sympathy for the women who were allegedly manipulated into his orbit through his loverboy technique. She believes Tate was clearly using social media to trawl for young, naive-looking girls who would be easier to manipulate and groom into his webcam industry.

“That’s an age where girls feel the most insecure and they’re the most excited to get any attention,” she said. “The fact that he’s specifically stated that he manipulates young women into sex work, I think that’s a problem.”

Tate has repeatedly spoken publicly about his preference for younger women, including telling VICE World News in 2022 that he considers them “less jaded, less upset, less suspicious” than older women.

Women who have publicly spoken out about Tate have faced huge blowback from his fanatical army of online supporters, and Gușă is no exception. Since speaking to reporters about her brush with Tate, she said she has been deluged with abuse, calling her a liar or warning her to back off.

“I get ‘You’re a liar,’ or ‘You’re such a slut, you had Instagram at 16 – it’s your fault.’” She said others have messaged her with details of her current whereabouts and threatened her, saying; “Daddy isn’t here to protect you.”

VICE World News reached out to Tinder and Instagram for a response on how Tate used their platforms in his efforts to groom women – and how the platforms could potentially be used in other trafficking attempts.

Tinder did not comment directly on Lisa’s experiences, but said through a spokesperson that the platform had a “a zero tolerance policy for any type of illegal activity, including grooming.”

“Tinder constantly invests in ways to protect members, including a robust suite of safety features,  in-app education and detection technology. We also work directly with law enforcement when needed.”

A spokesperson for Meta, the company that owns Instagram, said Tate had been banned from the platform in August – when he was kicked off a number of major social media platforms for breaching policies forbidding gender-based hate.

“[We] have a range of features in place to protect women and girls from unwanted contact. Anyone can control who can send them DM requests, and adults can’t start DM chats with under 18s who don’t follow them,” said the spokesperson.

“We use technology to find potentially suspicious adults, and automatically prevent them from finding, following and interacting with teen accounts. We’ve also worked with women’s safety experts to develop rules designed to address harms that disproportionately affect women, for example sexualised or misogynistic language, threats of sexual violence and the sharing of non-consensual intimate imagery.”

Lisa looks back on her brush with Tate with bemusement. She feels embarrassed to have dated a man with such toxic attitudes to women, and slightly worried that the few people that knew of their connection might mistakenly think she was caught up in his seedy business.

Because she figured out pretty early on that Tate was trying to recruit her, she doesn’t believe she would have succumbed to his grooming attempts. But given the apparent scale of the mass recruiting techniques, she said she is certain that some other, more vulnerable women will have. “I’m just pleased I never flew out there to stay with him,” Lisa says. “I think you would be made to feel isolated and controlled.”

While the alleged extent of Tate’s exploitation of women – and the radically misogynist public persona he had cultivated – were shocking, she wasn’t surprised by any of it, given the deep insecurities he’d shown glimpses of during the time they were in contact.

“He wants to be seen as superior and manly, and if you don’t think he’s the top, then he doesn’t want anything to do with you,” she said. “He talks about women like they’re crap.”

The post How Andrew Tate Used Tinder and Instagram To Try To Groom Women As Camgirls appeared first on VICE.