Canceled by Hinge
· The Atlantic
Saint Patrick’s Day 2023 had been one of those particularly defeating nights out. Jenna Enfield’s roommates, dressed in shamrocks and green, piled onto her bed, shouting edits as she drafted and redrafted the message. “You and I had something very special and I’m so lost without you,” Enfield typed into her phone. “I love you, I need you, I yearn for you. Please.”
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She was writing not to a lost love, but to Hinge, the dating app, which had banned her from its platform a few weeks earlier, with no explanation beyond that she’d violated the app’s guidelines.
Hinge, with approximately 30 million users, is one of the most popular dating apps in America. Like other dating apps, it can kick people off at its discretion. Users are encouraged to report anyone on the site who sends offensive or abusive messages, or who behaves inappropriately on dates. But according to Match Group, the company that owns Hinge and other platforms, “80% of harmful accounts are proactively removed before a user ever reports them.” This suggests that most people getting banned aren’t being reported by other users, but flagged by algorithms or AI—perhaps for offensive language, for photos that appear manipulated or fake, or for behavior that suggests the account belongs to a bot and not a real person.
Hinge prioritizes “creating a safe, respectful, and intentional community,” a spokesperson told me. “When someone reports harassment, fraud, or other harmful behavior, we take it seriously.” Hinge is, understandably, trying to protect its users. And itself: The app has also failed to kick dangerous users off its platform, and is facing a lawsuit as a result. But frequent banning is catching up many innocent people, too, I learned from my reporting. It also risks backfiring—and creating a new way for bullies and vindictive exes to inflict suffering.
The banned are not hard to find. I know because I am one of them. After I was kicked off Hinge last summer, I got curious, and started reaching out to others. Enfield was one of 16 people I interviewed this winter who had been banned by Hinge. One person I spoke with admitted to acting—at the very least—obnoxiously. He told me he had called some women “boring,” criticized their “lack of effort,” and occasionally sent messages including only a series of three numbers (137, 180)—trolling women by pretending to guess how much they weighed. Enfield thinks she knows what happened in her case. She was deciding where to move after college, and she would change her location on the app to explore the dating prospects in other places. That may not be how Hinge wants the app to be used, but it hardly constitutes abusive behavior. Everyone else I spoke with had been banned without knowing why.
Most were women. Most had the basic, free Hinge subscription. Most had taken a hiatus from the app before they got banned. Most speculated that a man whose messages they hadn’t replied to had reported them. A number suspected that they’d been reported by an angry ex or his friends. (You don’t have to match with someone to report them—users can report any profile that comes across their feed.) Almost everyone I spoke with asked to remain anonymous, for fear that people would think that they had done what they’d been—if only vaguely—accused of.
[Vivian Salama: A dating-app nightmare]
The banned can appeal the decision. But this seems to have a very low success rate—all 16 of the people I spoke with tried the formal appeals process, and only one made it back onto the app that way. Enfield’s email—“I feel like I’m standing outside a bar watching all my friends have fun inside”—went nowhere. Most people try to get around the ban in other ways: A quick Google search pulls up many articles and videos that detail tricks to get back on the app. An obvious first step is to use a different phone number. But Hinge can usually tell if a new account is created on the same device as a banned account. Enfield tried that in 2024. “I was in for, like, a day and then I got banned again,” she told me. After that, she gave up.
Match Group has the world’s biggest portfolio of online-dating services. When someone is banned from Hinge, they will be banned from Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, The League, and other platforms, too. Dating apps can be lonely and demoralizing—I think it’s fair to say that most people don’t much enjoy being on them. But this is how people date now. Getting shut out of them entirely can feel like a dating death sentence.
My best friend was banned a few months ago, on her birthday. “Perfect way to start my 28th year,” she said. At first she took it as a sign that she didn’t need to be on the apps. But only two days later, she was asking the app to let her back on. She asked ChatGPT to generate the email for her, and it worked. Within a couple of days, she was begrudgingly swiping through Jakes and Chads again. She is the only person I spoke with who successfully navigated the appeals process.
When we wrapped up our phone call about her experience, she told me she was actually headed out on a Hinge date. I asked her if she was excited. “Eh,” she said. “I’m not really excited about going on dates anymore.”
But it turned out she and the guy had something to bond over. An hour later, I saw that I’d missed a call from her. When I returned the call, I was greeted by a chipper British voice, notably male and notably not my best friend’s. “I was banned, too!” the mystery man said.
Her date, it turned out, had also been exiled from Hinge.
He suspected that he might have been banned for being an actor who is famous, but not famous enough—some people might have thought he was a catfish posing as a C-list actor. Or maybe someone “just said I was an asshole.”
In response, he told me, “I went completely rogue.” He bought a secondhand tablet and created a new account on it with a different name, email, and set of photos (he stressed to me that this was a very important step: “That’s the main way they’ll get you”). He then downloaded an app that generated a fake number on his iPhone so he could get past the two-factor-authentication system. He used his mother’s credit card to pay for the premium version of the app, to further mask his identity.
“And by the way, it fucking worked,” he said.
After all that, he was able to log in to this new account on his iPhone, swipe without pause thanks to his premium subscription, and end up on a coffee date with my dream girl of a best friend. All it required was about $100 for a used device, Mommy’s credit-card number, and a particularly desperate attitude toward dating.
I wasn’t willing to go that far.
Eight months ago, I held a funeral for my dating life as I knew it. I had taken a three-month hiatus from Hinge, but attending a few too many weddings alone sent me back into the world of online dating. I hadn’t deleted the app or my account, so I clicked on the curly H icon and began swiping. I went to bed that July evening satisfied that I had thrown my name back into the hat of modern dating with a few thoughtless movements of my thumb.
[Lora Kelley: America is sick of swiping]
The next morning, I woke up to a text message from an old Hinge match who I’d been on a couple of dates with. He sent me a screenshot of an email he’d received: “One of your matches, Annie Joy Williams, was recently removed from Hinge based on information regarding potentially fraudulent behavior.” The email warned him to be careful when communicating with me.
“Are you a scam bot?” he asked me.
I immediately imagined the dozens (hundreds?) of men in New York City who had ever matched with me waking up to that message, warning them of a dangerous catfish named Annie Joy. How could I come back from this? A few moments later, I got an email from Hinge saying that my account had been banned “for violating one or more of our policies.”
I clicked the “Appeal” button and frantically explained that I had no clue why I was being banned from the app, that I had never behaved inappropriately, and that I hoped someone would reconsider, or at least explain to me my wrongdoing.
Within the hour, I got a response informing me that my account would remain banned. “This decision is informed and final and subsequent appeals will not be considered.” There was no explanation, only a line that read: “We keep these decisions private to protect the anonymity of any users who may have reported you.” I pushed back, asking again for an explanation. “I’m not sure what rule I could have possibly broken,” I wrote. A few hours later, I received an email asking me to provide photos of a government-issued ID. That seemed both ridiculous (I barely wanted to be on Hinge in the first place!) and potentially risky—just that week, another dating app had been hacked, resulting in people’s private information being leaked. I decided it wasn’t worth it. Just like that, I was permanently removed from a major sector of the online-dating scene.
Women I spoke with who were banned seemed, like me, more willing to give up after the formal process ended, while men seemed more likely to find work-arounds. One male friend of mine was banned from Tinder and Hinge after deleting and re-downloading the apps. “Maybe somebody thought I was ghosting them because I wasn’t responding,” he speculated. “But I’m not going to message everyone I’ve matched with and tell them I’m going offline. That’d be crazy.”
When he found out that he’d been banned, he knew his odds of getting an appeal approved were low. “No one I knew had success with getting back on,” he told me. So he used an engaged friend’s phone number. His phone’s IP address was still flagged, so he could access the app only by borrowing her phone while they were hanging out, or by FaceTiming with her and “going through the options.” (One additional finding from my reporting for this story: just how generous some friends can be.) Eventually, he got a new phone and was able to log in.
He said that he doesn’t regret going to those lengths. He doesn’t like the bar scene; he doesn’t like “going up and talking to people.” Apps are “genuinely the No. 1 place I would go to find a relationship right now.”
Last year, six women who were drugged and sexually assaulted by a man named Stephen Matthews, a cardiologist they’d met on Hinge or Tinder, filed a lawsuit against Match Group. The suit accuses the company of negligence and of “accommodating rapists across its products.” Matthews was first reported for drugging and raping a woman in 2020. A few months later, Hinge recommended him to the same woman. Hinge had claimed to have banned Matthews at the time. But he remained on the app, and on Tinder, for three years after the initial report, despite more women reporting his behavior. In 2023, he was charged with 51 felony counts; he was found guilty of 35 counts in 2024, and he is serving a 158-year prison sentence. (When asked about the Matthews case, a spokesperson for Match Group told me the company was “unable to comment on pending litigation.”)
Dating apps exist in a legal gray area. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides social-media sites with broad legal immunity for most content posted by their users. But dating apps aren’t just for chatting—they are businesses that recommend romantic matches for real-life meetups. That makes them half social-media sites, and half matchmaking companies. They’re commodifying romance, which is a risky business. Given the possibility of abuse and assault, Hinge may be damned if it bans and damned if it doesn’t.
[Faith Hill: The fantasy of a nonprofit dating app]
“Section 230 is a procedural protection,” Olivier Sylvain, a professor at Fordham Law School who specializes in information-and-communications law and policy, told me. “It doesn’t resolve the question of liability. It blocks the inquiry into the liability.” Sylvain told me that no other industry besides gun manufacturing has that sort of procedural protection. Hinge can be held liable in the Colorado lawsuit, he explained, only if its product is found to be “defective”—if it is, for example, “promoting the worst people by design.”
Still, Sylvain sees the banning of innocent users as a potential overcorrection. “It sounds like they’ve overcompensated,” he said, when “they should instead be just watching for sexual predators.” He described widespread banning as “the problem of the heckler’s veto”—it’s what happens “when you give an incel, a loud person, an obnoxious person the ability to shut things down by submitting a complaint.”
In February, I talked with the Match Group spokesperson, who disputed what many people had described to me. “Levels of recent activity on the app, including taking a break or hiatus, do not make someone’s account more likely to be banned,” she said, adding that paying or not paying for the app “is not correlated” with banning. “Every user is subject to the same enforcement.” She also signaled that the company was aware of the issue of false reports: “Making deliberately false reports, or revenge reports, on any of our platforms is not acceptable and may result in a ban.” (The company wouldn’t provide any details on having enforced this.)
I spoke with a former Hinge employee who’d managed notifications—working on the very type of email that got sent out about me. They asked not to be named because they didn’t want to burn bridges with their former bosses, but they told me that it was not uncommon for banned users to threaten to sue for defamation. “People would write in and threaten lawsuits and say, ‘Repeal my ban,’” this person told me. At the time my email went out, it included my last name—identifying information that, for safety and privacy reasons, is not included on users’ profiles. Hinge told me it had changed this practice in September—I suspect as a result of complaints.
This person described the emails as “a constant frustration.” Eventually, they spearheaded an effort to send out the occasional correction email if the ban was reversed, “basically to say, ‘Hey, you know, that person wasn’t a scammer. We’re sorry.’”
Most people getting banned aren’t being reported by other users—they’re likely getting flagged by AI. The process, the Match Group spokesperson told me, is “designed to balance technological tools with human oversight.” AI is used for scam detection and content moderation, and, according to a Hinge statement, “every appeal is reviewed by a trained human moderator for thoughtful, individualized consideration.”
The only way around this AI bureaucracy may be to find someone who works at Hinge and beg them to help you.
Both the former Hinge employee who worked on notifications and another former employee who worked in C-suite support (and who also asked to remain anonymous) independently told me about the existence of an email address for high-priority unbanning. “There’s an internal email that you can get referred to to have an actual person at Hinge review your profile,” the first former employee told me. “The sad truth is that the only way to have a human review your appeal is to know someone at Hinge.” (The Match Group spokesperson denied that this email address existed: “There is no internal process through which employees are able to receive preferential treatment regarding account bans—for themselves or anyone else.”)
The first former employee said that they received LinkedIn or Facebook DMs weekly from random people asking to be unbanned. Once, they received a DM from a guy at Meta who asked to be unbanned in exchange for a Meta-related favor in the future. The other former employee said that someone high up at the NFL once messaged them asking for an expedited appeal. “He was like, ‘Look, I’m, like, 36, and I didn’t even do anything on the app. Can you unban me? I’ll do you a favor.’” This person helped him get unbanned through the high-priority email and later scored an interview for a job at the NFL. (I could not independently verify these accounts.)
[Kaitlyn Tiffany: The woman who made online dating into a ‘science’]
But both former employees told me that even they couldn’t get some of their friends back online: A number remained banned even after the expedited appeals process, and they never knew why.
I’d learned a lot about the system, but I still didn’t know what I’d wanted to find out in the first place: Why was I banned?
The Match Group spokesperson told me they couldn’t provide any details about my account, and recommended that I reach back out to the email address that had informed me that my appeal was denied. “They will be able to assist,” the spokesperson assured me.
I tried that, and received a response from someone named Pablo within a few minutes. I asked, “Are you a human or AI?” Pablo responded to my email, but dodged the question. I asked again. The next morning, I received a response from someone named Frida saying, “Please note, too—we’re real people who receive your emails and we genuinely want to help you.” So that was nice. She asked for my phone number. I gave it. Then she asked for my ID again. Why did she need it?, I asked. Had a person or an algorithm suggested I wasn’t real? “If you wish to continue using the app, please don’t hesitate to submit your ID,” Frida replied.
Getting dumped by Hinge has certainly handicapped me when it comes to dating in a big city. In the eight months since I got banned, I’ve been on two dates; when I was on Hinge, I used to go on a date or two a week. I now rely on setups and real life run-ins. I keep my eyes peeled for prospects, because I can no longer go home and scroll through an infinite selection of (supposedly) eligible bachelors. When insecurity creeps in on any given Tuesday night, I can’t open my phone to the affirmation that men I never intend to meet “like” me—or, at least, like how I look.
But now that I’m limited to the actual guest list at any party, I find that I am willing to give people more of a chance. When I was on Hinge, I had, if anything, too many choices: I never had to decide on anyone because there was always someone else, someone maybe even better, waiting to be discovered. But someone I might have ignored for a few bad photos, weak quips, or a fear that they’re not actually 5 foot 11 (no Hinge man is actually 5 foot 11) might prove to be an incredibly decent and attractive man in real life.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t often wish I could retreat back into the world of Hinge, where an ego boost comes easy and I can have a date scheduled in an hour. But I don’t think we were necessarily designed to date that way. I’m trying to convince myself that I’m not missing out on a big portion of the dating scene, but being graciously spared. I now have to date with more intention, even if with less frequency. And for a while, I took some hope from Jenna Enfield’s story. Last summer, after a year of attempting to get back on Hinge, followed by a year of swiping on other apps outside Match Group, Enfield deleted her dating apps altogether. A month later, she met a good man at a bar downtown.
But then, just before this article went to press, they broke up. He’s probably back on Hinge.