YouTube comedian Davison created two fake but near-identical Tinder accounts to see which one would get more matches: the one with her posing as a Christian versus the one where she poses as a Muslim. While Davison never explicitly stated in her profiles that she was a member of either faith, the only word she included in her bios was “faith,” which led people to logical conclusions. Opening up her age preferences to range from 18 to 40, she started swiping to see what would happen. The says the first 12 hours were rather uneventful, however “Christian Sara” was the more popular out of the two accounts.
However, Saturday night is when things stated to get rocky:
Davison explained that ‘everything fell apart’ when she found her ‘Muslim Sara’ account had been ‘blocked’ on Tinder because too many people had reported the profile.
So she sent a number of emails to Tinder to try and get it reactivated, even suggesting that it was because of her ‘faith’ that the account was ‘under review’ in the first place.
‘My profile appears to be under review for being reported too many times (?),’ she wrote in an email to the app’s administrators, before adding that she is a ‘real person’ and including a link to a Facebook profile set up to go along with the account.
‘Can you please remove the block. I am worried it is because of my faith.’(via)
Prior to being blocked, “Christian Sara” had a match rate of 63.8% whereas “Muslim Sara” had a rate of 44.6%. And while Davison believes that she was blocked due to her appearance, she does state that many of her matches recognized that she had two profiles:
Interestingly, many of the men recognized the fact that she had two profiles, with one even querying whether or not she was ‘making an experiment’, prompting Sara to note – with a hint of surprise in her voice – that a lot of male Tinder users pay a lot more attention to women’s profiles than many might assume.(via)
With that in mind, it’s just as logical that the Muslim account was blocked for being blatantly fake as opposed to being blocked due to its religion. Davison does acknowledge this possibility however, stating “I have no way of knowing if it’s that users were angry because they saw I had two identical profiles, or if it had something to do with the fact that I was Muslim that I was banned, but I find it very interesting that until today, Tuesday, I have a fully functioning Christian Sara profile and a completely blocked Muslim profile.”
[H/T Daily Mail]