Who’s your presidential sweetheart? Tinder gets political with ‘Swipe the Vote’

Dating on Tinder not getting you anywhere? No worries, Tinder is giving you something else to do if you’re bored with trying to find someone to hook up/mate for life with — finding your presidential candidate.

If you’re still undecided on which candidate you want to run the United States, the popular dating app is offering a new feature that lets you swipe left or right on certain issues, such as if you want to “keep same-sex marriage legal” or “abolish the death penalty.” Each one of these cards offers more contextual information when you click on them.

tinder

For example, clicking on the same-sex card will teach you that, “the U.S. legalized gay marriage across all 50 states on June 26, 2015, making it the 21st and most populous country to legalize gay marriage.”

There are 10 issues presented, and once you swipe left or right on all of them you will be matched with a presidential candidate who best represents your views. You can see how you did compared to other candidates, and also learn more about each candidate by tapping on their cards. Of course, you’re given the option to share your matched candidate — but more importantly, Tinder has collaborated with nonprofit Rock the Vote to provide an easier way and incentive to register to vote.

tinder match

Tinder says its new feature was built with Wedgies, a polling platform, and the data on the candidates and issues comes from another app called Voter. Voter launched last September and essentially has the same function as Swipe the Vote, as it lets users match themselves with a candidate and offers more robust information on them, and the issues they stand for.

“Our goal has always been to help as many people as possible become informed,” said Voter co-founder Hunter Scarborough. “So leveraging something like Tinder’s massive, massive audience to do that was a super exciting opportunity and we definitely didn’t want to pass that up … If [people] want some deeper results and more refined personalization, they can go directly to Voter.”

It’s also clear that Tinder became interested in adding politics into its dating app after various people and groups began using Tinder to campaign for candidates like Senator Bernie Sanders and former candidate Senator Marco Rubio.

You should be able to see a “Swipe the Vote” video card some time today as you swipe through people in the app.

from Planet GS via John Jason Fallows on Inoreader http://ift.tt/1RhFu9H
Julian Chokkattu