Morgan* woke up early on Thursday, April 21, a day intended to be spent studying for a final exam in a competitive program at University of British Colombia, to the sound of her phone buzzing.
This is weird, Morgan thought. She knew Chris, but she hadn’t spoken to him for several months. They certainly had no plans of hanging out. She was typing out a reply when her phone buzzed again.
Morgan didn’t have time to react. Her phone vibrated with new unknown numbers. She read messages from John, Samir, Austin, and Clayton-names of guys she didn’t recognize. The time between texts shrunk rapidly. As fast as she could type out a message to one sender, several more would flash on her phone.
“Where did you get my number?” she asked one mysterious texter. From her Bumble account, he replied. Her phone buzzed again.
Morgan googled Bumble and quickly found it’s the so-called feminist Tinder, where only women can send the first message. She sent Bumble an email asking to rescue her from the uninvited onslaught she was enduring from a dating site she never knew existed. If someone had set up a fake account for her there, she wanted it shut down now.
;a rather unfunny joke one of her friends had pulled. It should all be over in an hour or so, Morgan thought. But her phone kept buzzing. And buzzing. And buzzing.
Then the calls started. Morgan didn’t dare answer. “Where are you?” strange voices kept asking on her voicemail. Some of her would-be dates were sitting in coffee shops, and pubs across the city, wondering when she would show up. Morgan was paralyzed. And the buzzing and calls kept coming.
Morgan had never heard of Bumble before
Online dating disproportionately bombards female users with messages. The New York Times found men are three times as likely to swipe right for a woman than women are to swipe right for a man.
This past October, the Angus Reid Institute found that nearly half of Canadians aged 18 to 34 say they’ve been harassed on social media.