The Ukrainian men I matched with appeared unruffled. Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images
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If you are impatient with the calibre of potential partners in your city, Tinder has a feature for you. For £18 a month, you can “passport” to another place; that is, you can set your location to anywhere in the world. Tel Aviv, Jeddah, Moscow, Kyiv. Tinder’s blandness, combined with the fact that matchmaking is a universally smiled-upon process, has allowed it to operate as a politically-neutral entity — even in sexually repressive or war-torn regimes.
It’s well-documented that social media is playing a vital part in this conflict: Ukrainians with working smartphones are publicising the terrifying experience of having their home invaded. But in Russia, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Instagram have all been banned, leaving all but the most determined with nothing but fake news and propaganda.
Tinder, though, continues to operate normally. Some in the West have passported to Moscow to talk with beleaguered Russians and find out what their lives are like now. But others are passporting with more explicit political aims. A Slovakian media agency has launched an initiative called Special Love Operation, which encourages Tinder users to bombard Russian singles with images from the war in Ukraine to show them what’s really going on. “The Russians do not know the truth about the war in Ukraine,” its website reads. “Putin ignores the whole world, but maybe he doesn’t ignore his own people. We found a way to bypass censorship on Tinder.”
The agency tells users to change their profile picture to a selfie with a picture of a war-torn Ukrainian city (it provides 12 images), and change their profile description to a paragraph in Cyrillic, which reads: “Please don’t turn away, don’t turn a blind eye — innocent people like you and me are dying in Ukraine. They too wanted love, [to] live and get acquainted — now they sit in basements … lose their loved ones and relatives, freeze.”
Tinder has also become a way to connect meaningfully with those on the ground in Ukraine. Many in the West are desperate to help Ukrainians — especially since the refugee schemes were announced, and then promptly descended into chaos. Tinder has become one way for those in the UK keen to sponsor a refugee through the government’s scheme to connect with someone in need of shelter, albeit a mode uncomfortably adjacent to sex.
Curious, I decided last week to revive my Tinder. I was reporting in Dubai at the time, so started by swiping past a warning that I was in a country that did not respect LGBTQ rights, into a sea of slick-haired men looking for, among other things, “nothing serious”. With a few taps, I had upgraded my Tinder account so that I could passport — not to news-bomb or refugee-seek, but to hear what people are thinking, doing and feeling in both Russia and Ukraine. After all dating apps, unlike Twitter, encourage people to share their thoughts privately.
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SubscribeA good Unherd article that throws a different light on things than the usual MSM narrative. Woke doesn’t travel well. Plenty of Russians will agree that the west is decadent with weird ideas and a tendency to interfere in other countries affairs and who can blame them. The tendency in most countries is to believe the propaganda of one’s own country. It is only in the west that we have non-stop propaganda about how evil and incompetent we are.
“The agency tells users to change their profile picture to a selfie with a picture of a war-torn Ukrainian city (it provides 12 images), and change their profile description to a paragraph in Cyrillic, which reads: “Please don’t turn away, don’t turn a blind eye — innocent people like you and me are dying in Ukraine. They too wanted love, [to] live and get acquainted — now they sit in basements … lose their loved ones and relatives, freeze.”
Sorry, but this is absolutely terrible propaganda psychology. Seeing sad images of their opponents in a war is unlikely to move Russians – or, in fact, anyone. Did the Afghanistan or Iraq or Yemen or Ethiophia wars stop due to sad pictures?
If the propagandists were clever they would provide images of Russian troops suffering from hunger, untreated wounds, frostbite, etc. to try to drum up domestic anger about the war. (“The generals aren’t treating our troops properly!”) Or pretend to be “Sergei”, an 18-year-old conscript who loves Russia, misses his dog. and just wants to go home.
I mean, the most basic rule of communication is to think about the effect on your audience, not just what you want to say.
In general, the Ukrainian propaganda has been ill-thought out and over the top, and the Western media has basically swallowed it whole. Can’t comment on the Russian propaganda, it’s been censored quite effectively.
It also seems hopelessly naive to think the Russians don’t know that innocent people are being killed and places are being destroyed. They are aware a war is happening and that’s basically what happens in wars.
Much more interesting than I expected from that title!
Thank you for doing some real journalism, Zoe: finding out about something and then explaining what you’ve found.
Such a change from the BBC/MSM endless interviews with crying people.
I found this article unusual and fascinating – it gives a window into some individual human interactions from a unique perspective.
Also for me personally it was a relief to see articles different from the wall to wall Jubilee offering.
I enjoyed your article a lot. Good pov of view all around. However I will say although I am from the west I wouldn’t say the Russians are only brainwashed and listening to their “propaganda” in the end we don’t exactly know what the US is doing or has done. The US invaded Iraq on a lie and overthrew the government and completely destroyed the country and faced zero repercussions. We do not know all of the shady stuff the US has done in Ukraine. Ukraine has been widely known as the most corrupt country in. Europe for years now and a money laundering hotbed for the US, we manufacture chemical weapons there, we had Joe Bidens unqualified son on the board of an energy company there, there’s deeper relationships there than anyone knows and the whole world knows that we are currently discarding their ppl to fight a proxy war for us to weaken Russia. I wouldn’t be so quick to judge. It’s all a very sad situation, it will be interesting if the real truths ever come out one day.
I enjoyed your article a lot. Good pov of view all around. However I will say although I am from the west I wouldn’t say the Russians are only brainwashed and listening to their “propaganda” in the end we don’t exactly know what the US is doing or has done. The US invaded Iraq on a lie and overthrew the government and completely destroyed the country and faced zero repercussions. We do not know all of the shady stuff the US has done in Ukraine. Ukraine has been widely known as the most corrupt country in. Europe for years now and a money laundering hotbed for the US, we manufacture chemical weapons there, we had Joe Bidens unqualified son on the board of an energy company there, there’s deeper relationships there than anyone knows and the whole world knows that we are currently discarding their ppl to fight a proxy war for us to weaken Russia. I wouldn’t be so quick to judge. It’s all a very sad situation, it will be interesting if the real truths ever come out one day.