Bumble, the dating app for people interested in more “serious” relationships than those found on Tindr and Match (though, frankly, that’s a low bar), is taking steps to prevent legal gun owners from using their sexy, sexy weapons to entice members of the opposite sex.
According to The New York Times, Bumble’s corporate team is laying the groundwork to ban photos of firearms on its massive 30 million-strong singles network, preventing users from posting photos of themselves holding or brandishing firearms or displaying their armament collections.
Bumble’s founder and now CEO, Whitney Wolfe Herd, says the company won’t even give users a deadline to remove their gun photos. A temporary force of 5,000 will scour the platforms existing profiles, seeking out pictures of weapons and deleting them without ever notifying the affected user. The only users who are safe are active duty police or military — and even then, they can only post photos which feature weapons if they are shown in uniform.
“We just want to create a community where people feel at ease, where they do not feel threatened, and we just don’t see guns fitting into that equation,” Herd told the NYT.
But Herd also defended her hard line, even when asked whether she considered gun hobbyists or professional shooters a “danger” to an online community where users can simply scroll past photos of people they aren’t interested in. Those users, she said, could appeal to the company to allow their photos restored, but that would involve an investigative process.
Herd also expressed her support for censorship, suggesting to the NYT that if she could, she would “police every other social platform in the world,” including Facebook and Twitter, and claimed that Bumble’s strict new policy is superior to more lenient blanket rules in place at other networks. Eventually, she hopes to “filter out” all written mentions of guns, as well. She calls the decision “the right thing to do.”
But since Herd can’t fully ban her users from owning firearms, she’s also donating $10,000 to “gun safety” charities, so that she covers all her bases.
Fortunately for gun owners, there are some niche dating apps that will help connect you to others who share your interests. And Herd says she’s not afraid to lose members of Bumble to those, anyway.