Tinder users still getting banned after showing support for Black Lives Matter

A Tinder user in Utah, Jade Goulart, decided recently to use her account to support Black Lives Matter. She added a to her bio and wrote, “Instant response if you sign this petition.” Goulart said she also added something like, “You mean to tell me you aren’t out protesting for human rights? Wack.”

A week later, she couldn’t sign in. Tinder had banned her. 

“I felt like something was weird about that,” Goulart told Mashable over Twitter DM. “So I looked it up and saw that Tinder had come out and said that they originally were banning accounts for promoting BLM because it was against the ‘promotional purposes’ part of their terms.” 

She read BBC’s coverage from early June, in which Tinder explained users were banned for fundraising for Black Lives Matter and related causes because such promotion was against its Community Guidelines. 

The dating app quickly walked that back, days after people began posting about it on social media, saying it wouldn’t ban users for such activity anymore. “We have voiced our support for the Black Lives Matter movement and want our platform to be a place where our members can do the same,” a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. 

Users claim, however, that Tinder is still punishing them for their support for Black Lives Matter.

Users claim, however, that Tinder is still punishing them for their support for Black Lives Matter.

Goulart wasn’t banned until June 24, well after Tinder’s June 7 expression of support for BLM. After she contacted Tinder multiple times, the support team claimed that it didn’t have an account associated with her email address.

She isn’t alone. Across social media — Twitter and Reddit especially — Tinder users are still saying the platform banned them after writing Black Lives Matter and other phrases about racial justice and police abolition in their bios and messages. 

When they contact Tinder they’re often left hanging with no explanation of how they violated the app’s or . While none of the eight users we spoke to can say for certain why they were banned, they made efforts to confirm their suspicions, quickly learning that Tinder doesn’t have a customer service phone number or a live chat. 

Katie Holcomb had a similar experience to Goulart’s, shortly after paying for a membership. Her Tinder profile stated that she was anti-racist and pro-police-abolition. She was banned on June 30 while she was conversing with two matches, their messages complete with cute dog gifs.

“We were having a good time,” Holcomb wrote Mashable over Twitter DM. “Then the ban screen popped up out of nowhere, and I was locked out of my account completely.”

It’s not just in the United States. English user Chantelle Smith’s Tinder account met a similar fate. She had the term “ACAB” (all cops are bastards) in her bio and Smith told Mashable that a police officer messaged her, saying, “I hope the ACAB isn’t meant for me.” 

“I saw that he had pictures in his work uniform so I replied saying ‘actually it is acab, quit your job,'” Smith said via Twitter DM. “I proceeded to tell him that all police/cops are corrupt and even if they do not singlehandedly take part in wrongful murder, the ‘good’ cops are still watching it happen.”

Smith said the man replied saying he was going to unmatch her, and she was banned from the platform a day and a half later. She bel