Monday, September 28, 2015

Tinder Decries L.A. Billboard Warning Users to Get Tested for STDs (VIDEO)

Heh, Robert Stacy McCain called it already, "‘Hit-It-and-Quit-It on Tinder’."

They want that billboard to come down.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Tinder demands removal of L.A. billboard that tells dating app users to get STD test":

Tinder has sent a cease and desist letter to the AIDS Healthcare Foundation after a billboard went up in Los Angeles last week that draws a link between dating apps and a growing rate of sexually transmitted diseases.

The foundation said the billboard's purpose is to raise awareness about the increasing STD rate and to encourage dating-app users to get regular screenings or a “free STD check.” The billboard features silhouettes of people and the words “Tinder, Chlamydia, Grindr, Gonorrhea.”

“In many ways, location-based mobile dating apps are becoming a digital bathhouse for millennials wherein the next sexual encounter can literally just be a few feet away—as well as the next STD,” Whitney Engeran-Cordova, the foundation’s public health division director, said in a statement.

“While these sexual encounters are often intentionally brief or even anonymous, sexually transmitted diseases can have lasting effects on an individual’s personal health and can certainly create epidemics in communities at large,” the statement continued.

But Tinder, a location-based dating app, has fired back, saying the ad wrongly associates the app with venereal disease.

“These unprovoked and wholly unsubstantiated accusations are made to irreparably damage Tinder’s reputation in an attempt to encourage others to take an HIV test by your organization,” Tinder attorney Jonathan Reichman said in a letter to the foundation.

The foundation responded that it would not remove the billboard. It also referenced a Vanity Fair article that attributed a boom in casual hookups to the emergence of dating apps like Tinder...
Hey, we've got you covered at AmPow. The Vanity Fair piece is here, "The Tinder Hookup Culture and the End of Dating."

Yep, goodbye dating and hello STDs!

There's still more at the Times, heh.

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