How Dating Apps Are Failing Black Women | IRL: Online Life is Real Life

There Are No Girls on the Internet

iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture, Technology

4.4 • 820 Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2025

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dating apps aren’t broken; they’re working exactly as designed. And for Black women, that’s a problem.

In this season premiere of IRL: Online Life is Real Life, host Bridget dives into how dating apps reinforce harmful beauty standards rooted in whiteness, automating what researcher Dr. Apryl Williams calls “sexual racism” into the user experience.

This is the first episode in a four-part series from Mozilla and PRX exploring how tech shapes our most personal decisions. Subscribe now to catch every episode: irlpodcast.org

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an IHeart podcast.
0:08.5	There are no girls on the internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative.
0:16.6	I'm Bridget Todd, and this is there are no girls on the internet.
0:22.0	So some of you might know that when I'm not doing my thing here at There Are No Girls on
0:25.8	the Internet, I am also the host of a very cool podcast that I make with Mozilla, the makers of
0:30.7	Firefox, called IRL. It's all about exploring the ways that AI has already personally
0:37.0	impacted my life and how it's
0:38.7	probably already impacting yours too. The brand new season just dropped this week, and I wanted to
0:45.1	give you all a taste of the very first episode because it really dives into something that we talk a ton
0:50.2	about here at There Are No Girls on the internet. And that is dating apps, specifically the way
0:55.4	that dating apps are failing most of us, but especially they are failing black women like me.
1:01.1	And honestly, setting us up for some really not so great dating experiences. And I'm sad to say
1:07.8	that that is a feature, not a bug. That's according to research that we will dig into in this episode of IRL,
1:14.7	exploring all the ways that those failures are actually by design.
1:19.7	It's really not great.
1:20.9	And I think it's one of the reasons why we're seeing so many people,
1:24.6	especially younger people, just abandoning dating apps, because these apps are
1:29.3	just not serving folks up experiences that feel good or fulfilling. And then when these apps try to
1:35.6	make a move ostensibly for the better, all they're really doing is offering up these little
1:40.1	bells and whistles, like giving you the ability to filter dates by height preference.
1:44.8	Which, okay, yeah, maybe that's good for some people, but that's probably not going to
1:49.8	meaningfully change the kinds of experiences that people are getting on these apps.
	...

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