Tinder has very publicly banned a man for life after he racially abused an Asian woman.

Screenshots of text messages the man sent to a woman he met on the dating app circulated this week, drawing widespread condemnation. They show him lose his temper after the woman stops responding, using a racist term of abuse and saying: “Next time don’t give our your number dumb cunt.”



After the messages were posted on Facebook, other women came forward saying they too had experienced abuse and harassment from the same man.

On Wednesday, Tinder posted an open letter addressed to the man “and anyone who behaves like you”, announcing it had banned him for life. In it, Rosette Pambakian, Tinder’s vice-president, communications and brand, says:

I was personally offended by what you said. Your words to that woman were an assault, not only on her, but on all of us. Every day, we work to rid our ecosystem of bad actors like you. Why anyone would choose to go out into the world and spread hate I will never understand, but you do not have that choice on Tinder. Hate is not an option and we will continue to fight it wherever it rears its ugly head.

Tinder has banned users before for abuse or harassment, but this appears to be the first time it has targeted a specific user in one of its blogposts.



Pambakian said Tinder wanted to send “a very loud and clear message that we don’t tolerate abusive behaviour on our platform”.

She added: “We encourage anyone who has encountered this type of behaviour to report the user immediately so we can take swift action to remove them from our platform.

“As for [the user], we hope he’s learned that this type of abusive behaviour has consequences, and he cleans up his act in the future – it just won’t be on our platform.”

Tinder did not respond to a request from the Guardian as to why it had not spoken out about other instances of racial abuse on its platform – for example, when last year a man in Australia sent a racist message to an indigenous woman.

Tinder’s terms of service state:

“[Users] may not post as part of the service, or transmit to the company or any other user (either on or off the service), any offensive, inaccurate, incomplete, abusive, obscene, profane, threatening, intimidating, harassing, racially offensive, or illegal material, or any material that infringes or violates another person’s rights.”

Last year Tinder’s rival Bumble posted an open letter to a man who used its platform to rant about “feminist cancer” to a woman who had asked what he did for a living.