Users around the world are employing it for multilevel marketing, political campaigning, and promoting local gigs, a new study says.
Although
Tinder
is a platform facilitating casual dating, some of the app's nearly 50
million users around the world are employing it for multilevel
marketing, political campaigning, and promoting local gigs, a new
study says.
The
study, published in the journal The Information Society, found that
Tinder's off-label use -- a term borrowed from pharmacology
describing when people use a product for something other than what
the package says -- appropriates its infrastructure, and
sociocultural meanings.
"When
people encounter a new technology, whether it's a hammer or a
computer, they use it in ways that fit their needs and lifestyle,"
said study co-author Stefanie Duguay from Concordia University.
"However,
once you buy a hammer, it doesn't undergo regular updates or develop
new features -- apps do. They come with their own marketing, vision
for use and sets of features, which they regularly update and often
change in response to user activity," Duguay explained.
In
the study, Duguay assessed media articles about people using Tinder
for purposes other than social, romantic, or sexual encounters.
She
also conducted in-depth interviews with four off-label users.
One
of the users was using the app to conduct an anti-smoking campaign,
the study noted.
Another,
Duguay said, ran an anti-sex trafficking campaign on Tinder.
A
third user, she said, was using the app to market health products,
and the last was supporting US Senator Bernie Sanders's Democratic
Party presidential nomination run in 2016.
"I
also observed individual users adapting their Tinder profiles to
self-promote, market local bands, participate in business networking,
and conduct private sales," the researcher wrote in the study.
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