Did Theresa May lose her absolute majority in the British Parliament? It's (also) Tinder's fault. It's not a joke: to support it is the international version of the New York Times, according to which two Labor activists, to reduce abstention among young people and thus curb the consensus for the Conservatives (who in fact won the elections but losing seats), have devised a curious method.
It is well known that social networks are now increasingly important in electoral campaigns, but Tinder had never been heard of yet. How did the most intimate app, the one dedicated to looking for one's soulmate online, break into the political debate, moreover in an electoral session as important as that of the United Kingdom? Ingenious but simple: through the so-called "chatbot", i.e. the chat-robot, a program used by Tinder that simulates a conversation between a robot and a human being, which allows automatic dialogues by functioning either as a user of the chat itself or as a person who answers the FAQs.
In this case, they acted as a real electoral spot. The idea came to two young Englishmen, Yara Rodrigues Fowler and Charlotte Goodman, aged 24 and 25, who used the Tinder platform not to seduce other users and arrange amorous appointments but to incite them to vote. According to them, 30 thousand would have been reached by their chatbot, many of them young (therefore notoriously less inclined to vote for Theresa May) and in key constituencies, where the election of the MP was decided by a few votes.
To succeed in this enterprise, the two girls used not only their profile, but through appeals on Twitter and Facebook they asked other users to lend their profiles to the cause of Corbyn and Labour. Thus, the various profiles gave way to the chatbot which asked who the user intended to vote for, also suggesting – in a slightly mischievous way, as in the typical style of dating sites – options depending on the constituency .
“Precisely because Tinder is an intimate social network – said Yara Rodrigues Fowler -, people open up more easily and candidly talk about politics too”. Someone has even killed two birds with one stone: under the pretext of talking about politics, they honored the original vocation of Tinder by inviting the interlocutor or the interlocutor to dinner. At the very least, faced with the "convincing" arguments of a handsome contemporary, he will have thought about voting for Labour.
