Over last week’s bulletin, we discussed an interview with Evorah Cardoso, one of the idealizers of the #MeRepresenta project, that aims to get candidates to answer questions on human rights, so the voters can be clear of their position on the agenda. “It’s a political Tinder”, said the interviewee. In #MeRepresenta, candidates in general are subdue to questions, and not only the ones which the project identifies as defendants of an agenda; it is different from a project like Vote Trans, that we also commented on, which lists the candidacies of transgender people, and also the recent initiative of coordination from Blogueiras Feministas of producing a list and making visible candidates who are explicitly and openly feminists, according to a post of one of their organizers.

The Tinder metaphor, playing with the popular dating app, has been recurring: it has also been used by the Vota Campinas project, which has a proposal that relates with #MeRepresenta: candidates and voters register on their platform and, from 44 questions based on various topics of important recent discussions about the city (such as the discussion on gender in the classrooms of municipal schools, the fight against the dengue fever mosquito in the region, expansion of the environmental area, etc) and other general agendas (for example, the opinion on the public or private campaign financing), the platform does the matching of the voter with the candidates. More local and not only focused on issued directly connected to human rights, Vota Campinas is less activist and more properly a tool for the identification of suitable candidates — which is an interesting innovation, if we think that the most obvious way of informing yourself about a candidate in the past was the free electoral propaganda, that, for many candidates, meant the opportunity to show face, name and number.

What is even more curious is that, beyond the metaphor, Tinder has also been used by candidates in campaign as a way to get closer to the audience. Tinder is a well-known dating app that completes four years this week. It crosses information of their user’s Facebook profile and geographic location to suggest possible pairs for dating. In Brazil, the app was released in 2014 and, according to estimates (the company doesn’t reveal the total number of users), the country has over 10 million users. In a research made in 2015 by Global Web Index (GWI), it was also revealed that the crushing majority of users of the app are young: 45% are between 25 and 34 years old and 38% are between 16 and 24. According to the company itself, besides being one of the three countries with most users in the world, Brazilians log into the app an average of 11 times a day, adding to seven minutes of daily navigation. It is in these seven minutes, then, that the opportunity arises: there are news of candidates that started using the app to publicize their campaigns.

The use of dating apps for election purposes, whether by militants or by candidates, was already polemical outside Brazil: in the USA, this year, two users were banned from Tinder for using their personal accounts to spread campaign messages for the pre-candidacy of the democrat candidate Bernie Sanders to the presidency of the United States. The ban gained publicity, once campaigning through the app is not against its Terms and Conditions. The spokesperson for the company pleaded that, despite supporting users to show their political positions in the app, the block happened as the actions of the two users could be characterized as spam (not tolerated by the app). As the political manifestation of users during the elections kept growing, Tinder created, for the US, the tool called Swipe the Vote. Something similar to the projects we mentioned above, Swipe the Vote shows controversial questions to the user (such as: keep same-sex marriage legal?), who then answers them in the same way they swipe another user by liking or not, and, in the end, finds their political match (who’d be their perfect candidate).

In the Brazilian case, we are talking about effective political propaganda on Tinder, Happn and other apps. It seems to be a proper place for candidates who want to (1) reach a younger audience, (2) without the financial investment and (3) to create a more direct contact between candidate/supporter and the voter, a kind of door-to-door campaign. It is also possible that a candidate on Tinder is looking to flag issued related to gender and sexuality, like their opening to these themes, and specially if the candidates show themselves as LGBT. But this usage raises questionings and concerns as well.

Why does the use of dating apps for campaign purposes cause strangeness?

It is true that Tinder’s terms of use, for example, do not prohibit these uses — it is only forbidden to spam and sell products. There also doesn’t seem to be anything on the Brazilian electoral legislation in this sense — unless the candidate is paying for a Premium account, which raises a polemic that hasn’t been thought of before. Afterall, the electoral legislation prohibits paid publicity on the Internet, like sponsored posts on Facebook (Article 57-C of Law n. 9504/97). But to use a Premium account to campaign on Tinder would be framed in this? And what configures publicity, in this case? The mere exposition of the candidate’s photo and number?

It is true, as well, that users of platforms frequently create uses that were not originally thought by the developer, and that is part of the dynamics of social networks. But doesn’t the user of a dating app have a reasonable expectation that they will find people also looking to relate there? Doesn’t part of the users feel comfortable to expose themselves in a dating app for knowing that other people are in there for the same reasons? This can be specially relevant for users living outside the normative standards of sexuality. Besides, a politician that presents themselves on Tinder gives a dubious message of being available for a relationship and being there only to publicize their campaign; what does it mean to match a City Council Candidate? How to know if they are interested in love or sex or are just making publicity or both? Or are they simulating interest and availability to gain sympathy? It’s even worth reminding that, for their profile to be seen by more people, it is possible to configure these apps so that the profile is shown to both men and women, which can confuse even more the users on the sexuality of the candidates that uses the platform for election means.

The electoral legislation will always lag in relation to new ways of communicating, or even the citizen innovations in their use. There are some other issues, however, that will end up having to be discussed in the field of ethics, and the public debate and developing of sensibilities in relation to gender and sexuality. This seems to be one of them.

Team responsible for the content: Mariana Giorgetti Valente (mariana@internetlab.org.br), Natália Neris (natalia.neris@internetlab.org.br), Juliana Pacetta Ruiz (juliana.ruiz@internetlab.org.br) and Clarice Tambelli (clarice.tambelli@internetlab.org.br).

Translated by Ana Luiza Araujo