If you drew a Venn diagram of the people who support Bernie Sanders and the people who use Tinder, you’d probably end up with a circle. Sure, there’d be a few aged-hippie outliers, but it’s a fair bet that most of Sanders’s millennial supporters have at least downloaded the dating app, and some are using it to campaign on his behalf. Robyn Gedrich, 23, told Reuters she’d sent the message “Do you feel the bern? Please text WORK to 82623 for me. Thanks” to up to 60 users a day for the past two weeks — until her account was locked. In fact, many of the people who’ve been flooding Tinder chats with pro-Bernie messages have found themselves unable to log back in.
Haley Lent, 22, said Tinder locked her out Thursday night after she talked to between 50 and 100 people on the app, and several people have posted to the Facebook group Bernie Sanders’ Dank Tinder Convos saying their profiles have been deleted or locked as well. Gedrich said this was because her matches reported her as a bot, or a fake profile designed to send advertising spam. “People are reporting the pages as spam,” wrote Taylor Marie in the Facebook group. “But the Bern isn’t spam — oh no. The Bern is serious.”
