Canceled by Hinge - The Atlantic

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Updated at 9:55 a.m. ET on March 23, 2026<br>Saint Patrick’s Day 2023 had been one of those particularly defeating nights out. Jenna Enfield’s roommates, dressed in shamrocks and green, piled onto her bed, shouting edits as she drafted and redrafted the message. “You and I had something very special and I’m so lost without you,” Enfield typed into her phone. “I love you, I need you, I yearn for you. Please.”<br>She was writing not to a lost love, but to Hinge, the dating app, which had banned her from its platform a few weeks earlier, with no explanation beyond that she’d violated the app’s guidelines.<br>Hinge, with approximately 30 million users, is one of the most popular dating apps in America. Like other dating apps, it can kick people off at its discretion. Users are encouraged to report anyone on the site who sends offensive or abusive messages, or who behaves inappropriately on dates. But according to Match Group, the company that owns Hinge and other platforms, “80% of harmful accounts are proactively removed before a user ever reports them.” This suggests that most people getting banned aren’t being reported by other users, but flagged by algorithms or AI—perhaps for offensive language, for photos that appear manipulated or fake, or for behavior that suggests the account belongs to a bot and not a real person.<br>Hinge prioritizes “creating a safe, respectful, and intentional community,” a spokesperson told me. “When someone reports harassment, fraud, or other harmful behavior, we take it seriously.” Hinge is, understandably, trying to protect its users. And itself: The app has also failed to kick dangerous users off its platform, and is facing a lawsuit as a result. But frequent banning is catching up many innocent people, too, I learned from my reporting. It also risks backfiring—and creating a new way for bullies and vindictive exes to inflict suffering.<br>The banned are not hard to find. I know because I am one of them. After I was kicked off Hinge last summer, I got curious, and started reaching out to others. Enfield was one of 16 people I interviewed this winter who had been banned by Hinge. One person I spoke with admitted to acting—at the very least—obnoxiously. He told me he had called some women “boring,” criticized their “lack of effort,” and occasionally sent messages including only a series of three numbers (137, 180)—trolling women by pretending to guess how much they weighed. Enfield thinks she knows what happened in her case. She was deciding where to move after college, and she would change her location on the app to explore the dating prospects in other places. That may not be how Hinge wants the app to be used, but it hardly constitutes abusive behavior. Everyone else I spoke with had been banned without knowing why.<br>Most were women. Most had the basic, free Hinge subscription. Most had taken a hiatus from the app before they got banned. Most speculated that a man whose messages they hadn’t replied to had reported them. A number suspected that they’d been reported by an angry ex or his friends. (You don’t have to match with someone to report them—users can report any profile that comes across their feed.) Almost everyone I spoke with asked to remain anonymous, for fear that people would think that they had done what they’d been—if only vaguely—accused of.<br>Vivian Salama: A dating-app nightmare<br>The banned can appeal the decision. But this seems to have a very low success rate—all 16 of the people I spoke with tried the formal appeals process, and only one made it back onto the app that way. Enfield’s email—“I feel like I’m standing outside a bar watching all my friends have fun inside”—went nowhere. Most people try to get around the ban in other ways: A quick Google search pulls up many articles and videos that detail tricks to get back on the app. An obvious first step is to use a different phone number. But Hinge can usually tell if a new account is created on the same device as a banned account. Enfield tried that in 2024. “I was in for, like, a day and then I got banned again,” she told me. After that, she gave up.<br>Match Group has the world’s biggest portfolio of online-dating services. When someone is banned from Hinge, they will be banned from Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, The League, and other platforms, too. Dating apps can be lonely and demoralizing—I think it’s fair to say that most people don’t much enjoy being on them. But this is how people date now. Getting shut out of them entirely can feel like a dating death sentence.<br>My best friend was banned a few months ago, on her birthday. “Perfect way to start my 28th year,” she said. At first she took it as a sign that she didn’t need to be on the apps. But only two days later, she was asking the app to let her back on. She asked ChatGPT to generate the email for her, and it worked. Within a couple of days, she was begrudgingly swiping through Jakes and Chads again. She is the...