Along with fish pics and starting a conversation with “hey,” not caring about climate change is officially among bad dating app behaviors to avoid, and OkCupid is ready to enforce the new rule.
The dating app has rolled out a feature allowing users to filter out climate change deniers from their potential matches, and with recent data from various dating apps suggesting environmental concern is an increasingly hot topic on the apps these days, OkCupid’s no-nonsense filter stands to take a serious toll on climate change deniers’ dating lives.
OkCupid said it’s seen a 240-percent increase in environmental mentions in user profiles, including terms like “climate change,” “environment,” “global warming,” “Greta Thunberg” and “recycle.” Fellow Match Group-owned Tinder recently reported a similar trend, noting that terms like “climate change,” “social justice,” and “the environment” were particularly popular among Gen Z swipers in the company’s 2019 year-in-review report.
“On our app you can filter out anybody who thinks climate change is Fake News,” OkCupid announced in a tweet last week. While the company reported that an overwhelming 97-percent majority of its users believe in climate change, the new filter stands to make dating prospects pretty dismal for that climate crisis denying three percent.
On our app you can filter out anybody who thinks climate change is Fake News.
— OkCupid (@okcupid) January 14, 2020
Meanwhile, OkCupid’s algorithm matches users based on shared interests, meaning that even if climate-concerned users don’t have the climate denier filter on, they’re less likely to match with the climate change indifferent. “Since your match percentage with someone shows how compatible you two are, if you are a climate change activist and they think climate change is fake news, your match percentage is going to decrease,” Michael Kaye, OkCupid’s Global Communication Manager, told Gizmodo. And with over 82 percent of OkCupid users reporting an active concern over climate change, that puts climate apathy in significant minority.
Clearly climate change is hot right now, so if you can’t muster any actual concern for the planet, you should at least fake it for the sake of getting laid.
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